A million love songs

Bnny

A million love songs

Fireside discussion

April 18, 2024
Web Exclusive

By Daniel Gard'ner

Bnny's Jessica Viscius said her new record, A million love songs, is an album “about love after loss, getting older, and just trying to have fun with a broken heart.” Blatantly honest and sonically compelling, the record is a document of renewal and acceptance in the shadow of lingering pain.

While Bnny's debut, in 2021 Everythingwritten in the wake of her partner's death and subsequent emotional outburst, A million love songs finds Viscius in another phase, embracing new possibilities with the awareness that the pain of loss may never fully go away. There's a bruised hope in these songs, a sense that Viscius has emerged from a life-changing event battered but wiser and embracing a liberating sense of abandonment.

The hushed opener “Missing” seems to find Viscius embracing new love after her seismic loss (“when I'm with you/I almost forget/that she's missing”). But things are not that simple. A million love songs written in the wake of a breakup, and deepening her experience Vicious seems to have accepted the fleeting nature of romance. In fact, it practically makes it clear. there's a song on the record just called “Nothing Lasts”. But it's this acceptance that gives the album a charge, while also giving Viscius the space to examine her own destructive tendencies.

Viscius produced the record with Alex Farrar (Wednesday, Snail Mail) and the pair create an icy, almost eerie atmosphere with chilly guitar sheets and the occasional synth warble, interspersing tight mic drums with subtle programmed beats to create a dark shroud that hovers around Whiskey's voice, an intoxicating murmur that even at its loudest sounds like an evil whisper in your ear. It's a powerful combination that imbues the record with an almost eerie intimacy and pervasive tension.

The nervous jog of “Screaming, Dreaming” gives perhaps the most accurate picture of Viscius' current state of mind. Over choppy guitars and a spacious, insistent beat he repeats a simple chorus that somehow encapsulates where he's landed and perhaps where he's headed: “dreaming/hoping/dreaming/hoping/screaming.” (www.bnnyband.com)

Author Rating: 8/10