Three songs in An overview of phenomenal nature, we hear a sample monologue: “Well, these are real things that happen,” he begins. The speaker is a guard at Manhattan's now-closed Met Breuer museum, and the person who receives the voice memo and introduces it to us is songwriter Cassandra Jenkins. A New Yorker as interested in telling stories as she is in collecting them, Jenkins seems energized when people preface their thoughts in this way—when she senses that someone is about to reveal something honest, intimate, and useful.
Apparent Nature, Jenkins' second album, is filled with direct quotes, stories and dialogue. Often, her characters have names: There's David, Warren, Grey, Darryl, Lola, Peri, Hailey Gates. Some of them, like Gates, are the focus of entire songs, while others, like the museum guard, are spent in momentary scenes. The overall effect is less diary than documentary, as we follow a single subject around the world, supplemented with key insights from experts.
Working with producer and multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman, Jenkins keeps the album focused and cool. At just over half an hour, it includes one perfect song (the dazzling “Hard Drive”), five excellent ones and an instrumental coda. Surrounding her voice with sax and bass, drum loops and field recordings, acoustic instruments and new age synth, Jenkins' accompaniments mirror the conversational tone of her writing, ensuring that the revelations are not limited to the lyric sheet. The whole thing flows like an emotional discovery, connecting disparate observations into a serene and unified vision.
With the exception of “Michaelangelo,” a thematic overture that invokes the understated wisdom of Aimee Mann, Jenkins composed the entire album in Kaufman's studio over the course of a week. Simple and intuitive, her writing zooms in on a specific period of her life. In the summer of 2019, she was set to join David Berman on his comeback tour as Purple Mountains when, shortly before opening night, she received word that he had died by suicide. In all these songs, he guides us through the immediate aftermath—sadness, helplessness, canceled flights—along with a more fantastical fog of loneliness and confusion.
While Jenkins' early work offered a comfortable spin on glammy Americana, here she and Kaufman carve out a new vibe that feels particularly suited to this material. “Empty space is my escape,” she sings on “Crosshairs,” and her collaborators take those words as a kind of recipe, letting their melodies and rhythm materialize around her like constellations. Often, the rhythm of her narrative informs the band's sound: Her search for enlightenment in the depressing limbo of “New Bikini” makes them a kind of ambient lounge act, while the lonely ghost story of “Ambiguous Norway” emits a heavenly glow of her of fire, such as the ballads of Bon Iver rendered as sci-fi.
from our partners at https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cassandra-jenkins-an-overview-on-phenomenal-nature/