Events

[INDIE] Released to near-universal acclaim last year, barely-27-year-old Mitski Miyawaki’s Puberty 2 is an album that reflects painful personal growth. At a time in our culture when sadness is shunned in favor of muted emotions and is often greeted by a prescribed solution, Mitski is unafraid to use her music as a vehicle for processing difficult feelings. And she’s not entirely a product of our culture, anyhow: technically half-Japanese and half-Amercian, she seems uninterested in declaring allegiance to either. But the lack of grounding in heritage (and the fact that she lived in over a dozen countries as a child due to her father’s work) speaks to a unique understanding of alienation. Perhaps best surmised as a subtly lo-fi tribute to emotional adulthood seen through the lens of someone predisposed to depression, Puberty 2 — technically her fourth album — uses a seemingly bottomless barrel of romantic disappointments as cathartic means of reaching some semblance of emotional maturity. During traditional puberty (does that even exist anymore?), it’s considered acceptable to let emotions run wild. But as we get older, we learn to temper the urge to let those feelings up to the surface in favor of projecting a more even keel. Maturity, then, is depicted in how well we “keep our shit together” despite the turmoil we may be experiencing. Mitski is using her art as a steam valve for this process, this second pubescent wave, which is a large part of what makes Puberty 2 a thrilling listen: is she accepting it? Rejecting it? Maybe a little of each. Vacillating between the punky crunch of her own guitar and the cooler, narcotic feel of girl-group-noir a la Julee Cruise (made popular more recently by Lana Del Ray), Mitski and collaborator Patrick Hyland cook up a fairly complex menu of 11 tracks that seem deceptively simple the first time through. What reveals with repeated listening, however, is that the musical trajectory of the album is very carefully crafted to match her internal rollercoaster of emotions, which can swing all bipolar-style within the space of a three minute song. Opener “Happy” sets a tone of resignation as she licks her wounds post-one-night-stand, and by the time we get to the barely two-minute closer, “A Burning Hill,” she reconciles her emotional exhaustion as a ticket to something better, something more stable… more bearable. Along the way, it becomes clear that Puberty 2 owes a lot to Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, but Mitski has enough of her own musical palette to remain singular, as will surely be evident when she comes to Buffalo to play the Tralf Music Hall on Tuesday, October 3, with Stef Chura.