“one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden,” the sophomore album from Ada Lea (performing alias of Alexandra Levy), is staggeringly good. This is an album as chronicle, a retrospective of relationships and daily experience, romance, friendship, disappointment, longing, going out, staying in. All these songs are so crafty—in the sense that they show a lot of care was taken in their construction, but also in the fact that these melodies are a little evasive and sly, revealing their secrets slowly.
Levy has a poet’s knack for inhabiting words and knowing how to use the inherent rhythm/meter of her words in conjunction with the music. In so many songs on the album, she’s letting her lines run over, a little breathless in cramming all the words in, or she’s cutting them down into lingering whispers, little asides, twists in phrasing. You can hear it at the beginning of “partner,” the long scene-setting intro line, “still reeling from last night’s activities,” followed by the hard-hitting syllables of “too much friends, too much wine.” There’s a lot of thoughtfulness and invention in her lyrics, she’s always reaching for a surprising line, or an out-of-step delivery, something that reframes the way you listen to the song, like on “partner,” when she sings (in that same verse), “and this cab is moving too slowly down par avenue/it’s 3 pm Paris time.” The reference to Paris, showing the narrator’s preoccupation with a memory? Or on the beautiful album opener, “damn,” when she sings, “every year is just a little bit darker/then the darker gets darker/then it’s dark as hell,” the escalation and extremity, it all takes you by surprise.
Levy shows the same care and consideration with the music here, with so many songs on the album full of unexpected arrangements and trajectories. “damn” starts gently but then ends big, with a rolling, clamoring climax. “oranges,” like a bunch of the songs on the album, has one of those melodies that your brain can’t quite grasp at first, but then make total, revelatory sense after a few listens (maybe one of my favorite kinds of music listening experiences, when you encounter a song and think, I like this a lot, and then, a few days later, the melody somehow settles in your brain and you realize, wow, I fucking love this). The passion of “my love 4 u is real,” set against chugging and chiming guitars, and Levy’s almost operatic high notes, that intermittently crashes into a storm of distortion and static. Or the sweet sad opening of “hurt,” acoustic guitar strums and Levy’s whispers, barely but gorgeously embellished with soft drums and electric guitar—which all comes together for a cathartic ending.
There’s no easy comparisons for “one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden”—it feels kind of like its own thing, a really sharp and clear vision, presented in a compelling and entertaining way. Maybe close to something like Elliott Smith’s “XO,” that same high-level combination of songwriting and invention and artistry. One of my favorite albums of the year and one I’ll be listening to for a long time.
[BUY one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden]