Maybe it’s summer approaching, but I can’t get it out of my head that Elizabeth Hume’s music is rather like seaglass.
There’s something translucent, but hued – hazy and rounded, but inherently sharp – a sensation that until the moment her song washed up on shore, it was quietly but violently roiling, roiling beneath opaque waters. But you know: in a natural, beautiful kind of way: the emotional waters of life, that erode us down finer and softer.
And then, for Hume, that sea of emotions turns a song into a beautiful piece of seaglass.
Blue, I think. Now sweet little babies stare at it with their own big glass blown eyes with glittery wonder, vacationing siblings search for the beads of natural jewels over illicit family gossip, older beach goers bend their sunhats down, dipped toward the tide, and bring it home to top their decades-long stash.
Of the four songs in her current repertoire, Hume’s proven her adeptness in creating an upbeat, but aloof sound, as if fogged up – dreamlike. In “Breathing,” even her desperate break, screaming, “I wanna know you!” has an amber fuzz around it; “Sprinklers” reminds me of the torn, dream pop sound of Alvvays’ “Adult Diversion”; & my favorite, “Bee Sting,” features addictive harmonies over top a rolling melodic line, high and heavy at the same time like a cloud about to pour.
“Somewhere in Arizona” scales back significantly from the prior productions, guitar and voice, slow and confessional. It’s the part of seaglass that feels a little disarming – not the peaceful beachgoers, but the reminder of the bottle, of it first being broken.
‘Cause I’m disassociated
Focused on what they’re saying
but my mind is playing, playing games with me
Hume’s voice breaks, recounting the memory of a panic attack, of pure disassociation in a desert “too dry for [her] comfort.” The instrumentation picks up, the verses gaining high, bright harmonies against her breathy vocals. But the real kicker for me is in the chancing to skirt down, to at times let the lower notes grit, like the pebbles that rock the underside of the car when you hit a rough patch. The disassociation remains high, eerie, tired, but it trips into panic, and into something disconcerting, a feeling Hume represents in the layered vocals.
Showcasing the strange sensation of being wholly outside of oneself, Hume expresses the tight discomfort of braids wrapping around her neck, of being unable to make out what others are trying to tell her.
And I could drop dread in this rockbed I found
Know it’s dramatic, but I feel like lying down
[…] ‘Cause I’m panicked, sweating still in my chair
Can’t stop the braids in my hair
From wrapping tight around my neck
And they’re trying to tell me things
Are you trying to tell me something?
Maybe part of the reason I associate Hume’s music with seaglass is because this song, for me, is the kind of song I’d have on my iPod nano, sloshing through the quicksand that sinks me back to sea, looking at the horizon like I have concerns greater than what to make for dinner. And I mean, I do, but I’m listening to music to forget about that. To sink into somebody else’s catharsis and hope for a bit of my own.
And with this song, I get it.
Hume hits that perfect melange of melancholic, but high – frank, but not blunt. Honest music, beautiful, simple and sincere. Full of emotion, compacted into a memento you can’t help but collect. From the bee sting, the cold spray of sprinklers, the desert panic attack – Hume seems incapable of doing anything other than creating something wonderful out of what was a little painful, and broken. And I can’t wait to see what a young creative like her has in store for us next.
