While Asher White‘s musical output is a little difficult to catalog after a decade as a prolific Bandcamp releaser, Love Aggregates is the follow-up — not counting her cover of Jessica Pratt‘s eponymous debut — to her critical breakthrough and Joyful Noise label debut, 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living. (It’s her 18th album by most counts.) A breakup album by someone with an aversion to cliché, it’s a surprisingly (bitter)sweet, optimistic-sounding one, especially given that White, 25 at the time of its announcement, has confessed that it was her first time writing an album while deeply upset. One of the conspicuous effects of this circumstance, however, is toned-down production compared to the mercurial 8 Tips. Having said that, only the acoustic…
Tag Archive: Asher White
Jessica Pratt sings in a voice as gentle as unspun wool, but her stories feel deeply rooted, like they were born from a collective subconscious to reveal fundamental truths about human longing. Asher White gets at similarly heady ideas: leaving your city to seek reinvention, wondering whether your fate is predetermined. But where Pratt works primarily in the folk tradition, White’s approach is decidedly contemporary, drawing from Palberta and 100 gecs’ internet-laden glitchiness. Her music has the jangling, intentionally constructed commotion of an artist who synthesizes new sounds to understand something essential about the world she lives in.
As timeless as Pratt’s songs have always been, she’s followed a clear evolution since…
Listening to an Asher White record, you get the sense that she approaches songwriting like an interior designer. She treats her songs like rooms she can move throughout, rearranging their furniture — pushing the couch from one corner to another, angling a chair ever so slightly in a different direction.
“The sink thank you,” which opens her latest album, 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living, comes together like move-in day, starting as an empty room with nothing but some muffled, tentative strings before other additions begin to fill the space: slot machine sound effects, snare drums, faraway chimes, a thumping bassline, keys that sound straight out of Fiona Apple’s “Valentine,” a smattering of handclaps; until finally, White’s…