.Phoebe_Bridgers' 'Punisher': Album Review
has a high, wispy, pretty voice that often camouflages the intense, incisive or batshit things she’s singing about. Combined with the soft-focus production on most of her songs, it’s almost lulling — and if you’re only half-listening, you may not realize a song is told from the perspective of a murderer taking his last breaths, is a rebuke to her estranged real-life father or is directed at a skeevy former mentor-lover twice her age.
A prolific songwriter and serial collaborator, in the two and a half years since Bridgers’ breakthrough debut album, “Stranger in the Alps,” she’s dropped an EP as one-third of Boygenius, her harmony-heavy, ironically Crosby Stills & Nash-style “supergroup” with fellow femme bards Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus; released an album with Bright Eyes founder Conor Oberst under the name Better Oblivion Community Center; produced an album for guitarist Christian Lee Hutson; guested on the new 1975...
Yet what paradoxically poises the hushed and subtle “Punisher” to be a major breakthrough is its multigenerational appeal: There’s Elliott Smith and emo rock from her own youth; the Laurel Canyon singer-songwriters she was raised on; and even splashes of Gen X-era Liz Phair/Belly alt-rock.
And yet in the closing minutes of the final track, “I Know the End,” the musicians pile on so much noise — horns, crashing cymbals, guitar feedback, a chorus shouting, “The end is near!,” even a scream — that it’s as if she’s trying to crash the conceits of the preceding 10 songs. But then it all fades away, and the only sound left is Bridgers making a whooshing noise and laughing quietly — a self-deprecating end to an album she must know is one of the year’s best.
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