i don’t know who needs to hear this...

When songwriter Sarah Beth Tomberlin made her full-length debut as Tomberlin with the strikingly intimate and plaintive At Weddings in 2017, she did so with a minimalist color scheme consisting only of acoustic guitar, keyboards, light strings, and the liberal use of haunting echo. Producer Owen Pallett was her sole collaborator on the album. Arriving five years later, i don't know who needs to hear this... is somehow -- with a couple notable exceptions -- more elemental and spacious despite employing a far broader selection of instruments and over a half-dozen contributors, among them producer/engineer Phil Weinrobe (Adrianne Lenker, Kings of Convenience), Cass McCombs, Stuart Bogie, and Múm's Gyða Valtýsdóttir. Here, every sound makes an impression. The album's orchestral timbral palette is introduced in the opening seconds of "easy," which begins with muted bass drum and hi-hat alongside sustained, straight-toned low notes from what sounds like double bass and bass clarinet in unison. A single reverberating piano note joins in before the singer enters with half-sung, half-spoken lines that alternate with measures of silence over the basal drum rhythm. As the song progresses, it adds quiet, atmospheric electronics, full piano chords, and artful, dissonant piano runs that contribute to the record's occasional classical reference points. "Born Again Runner" and "Tap" consist of more-structured folksong, although "Tap" in particular has ghostly layered vocals, electric guitar, shaker-type percussion, and horns that, in turn, seem to appear out of nowhere and just as quickly dissipate. Elsewhere, saxophone is a recurring presence, winding between piano and strummed acoustic guitar on "collect caller" and providing counterpoint to vocals on the title track. This type of attentive listening is demanded throughout the first two-thirds of idkwntht, before the songwriter delivers two fuzzy rockers, "stoned" and "happy accident," that nonetheless continue to play with texture, including the crashing, metallic drum tones and brassy guitar effects on "stoned." Tomberlin abruptly quiets things down again with the bird-chirping intro to penultimate track "possessed," which sets the stage for a profound, self-referential title track that leaves listeners with advice including "I don't know who needs to hear this/Sometimes it's good to sing your feelings/Especially when you don't know the next line or how it goes." She's joined on that song by Told Slant's Felix Walworth, who echoes her sentiments over gently rocking, campfire-style guitar and spontaneous-sounding one-or-two-finger piano (and saxophone). Older, wiser, and more ambitious than on her collegiate debut, Tomberlin finds a musical artistry on i don't know who needs to hear this... that rises to the level of her lyrical perceptiveness. ~ Marcy Donelson