REVIEW: Mitski – Nothing’s About to Happen to Me

Mitski continues to build one of the most compelling bodies of work by a pop singer this century. We are lucky to be witness to an artist that is elevating a genre that is continually being debased around her. People will be still listening to Mitski while Addison Rae’s body lies mouldering in the grave.

The album sketches a story of a lonely woman living in a house haunted by a failed relationship. Each song is in the first person as the unreliable and likely unbalanced narrator rues her dislocation (‘In A Lake’), misplaces her phone, a modern devastation you will not hear me minimizing (‘Where’s My Phone?’), expresses her loyalty and devotion to her lover (‘Cats’), muses as to what would happen if she in fact left (‘If I Leave’), ideates her death (the especially devastating ‘Dead Women’), imagines herself as a ghost (‘Instead of Here’), drunk dials her now absent lover and pathetically promises to change (‘I’ll Change for You’), pictures an ultimately unhappy reunion (‘Rules’) , and rails against the natural world conspiring against and literally consuming her (‘That White Cat’).

Then, in the second to last song (‘Charon’s Obol’), an omniscient storyteller steps forward to tell the tale of girls that died in a house and are mourned by a pack of dogs. A woman, presumably the one of the first nine songs, escaped that fate (‘She was almost one of those girls/Who died in that house’) but came to buy the house with the hope that “she can heal the heart of her house.” We‘ve seen how that’s been going. The album ends with ‘Lightning,’ back in our protagonist’s voice, imagining herself (and perhaps those mysterious other girls) as a ghost again.

The concept sounds oppressive, but the album is not. It’s like Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a brisk novella, sad and creepy, witty and beautiful. The album’s press release notes the homage to that classic 1962 work in the video for ‘Where’s My Phone?” The influence goes deeper than that. Jackson explored the ghastliness of the quotidian. Maybe anti-social people are the sane ones. “’Oh Constance’, I said, ‘we are so happy’” is Merricat’s last line as the sisters retreat into total isolation.

Just living one’s regular life can be a horror. Mitski gets that. One day you’re backstroking peacefully (‘In a Lake”), the next day you’re back with stones sewn into your dress (‘Dead Women’). Trying to share that burden with another just multiplies the trauma. ‘Nobody else could forgive me/Quite as often as you.’ (‘If I Leave’)

Maybe death’s the gift, not life. “I can hear the song of my death/Singing for the lightning to come/Calling to the thunder, ‘Polo’.” (‘Lightning,’ the last song). Death pervades this album and it is not an entirely unwelcome visitor.

The dark lyrics are skillfully wrought and repeatedly offer up epigrams more bitter than sweet. But, there is humor, too. The way she says, ‘Surely, none of my colleagues’ (‘If I Leave’). Loitering drunk outside a bar like a kid waiting for a ride home (‘I’ll Change for You’). That darn neighborhood cat.

The music? Ah, the music. I think these are some of the most affecting songs musically in her career. It was recorded live with her full touring band and is instrumentally rich. French horns and strings dance with fuzzy guitars, mournful pedal steels and crisp drums. There are spectral choral parts that sound as if they emit from the Bardo, most strikingly in ‘Charon’s Obol.’ The album was mastered by Bob Weston, a member of the Steve Albini Chicago school, and one of these days I need to do a deep dive on why these guys were/are so good at what they do. The sound is similar to that of her last album but with some explosive punctuations à la her 2016 breakout album Puberty 2. Beautiful sounds cloak the razor-sharp poetry, sugar masking the arsenic.

Most important as always is Mitski’s voice, a wonderful instrument. I’ve said it in this very forum before that she reminds me of Karen Carpenter. You could slip ‘Superstar’ onto this album and it would not skip a beat. But America is a haunted house and you will find your own ghosts in here or they will find you.

Words by Rick Larson