At age 18 Arlo Parks burst onto the music scene with ‘Cola’, a groovy, chill, indie tune. Now, she’s back with that same relaxed energy at age 20 with her debut Collapsed In Sunbeams. The first time I heard Arlo Parks, I was listening to the BBC 6 Music breakfast show, which is perhaps the best time of day to listen to the native Londoner’s music. In the mornings one is in a calm, numb, state pre-cup of tea. Yawning and bleary-eyed, anything too demanding, energetic or jarring would simply break the spell of daybreak. Luckily, this record is everything you could wish for in an accompaniment to a coffee: soulful, muted and full of poetry.
The project opens with a poem of the same name. Only a minute-long, it constitutes as a short ode to pottering around with a lover whilst being at peace and at one with another person. She softly enunciates; “Feeding your cat or slicing artichoke hearts / I see myself sitting beside you / Elbows touching, hurt and terribly quiet.” It is these words which set the stage for the intimate, subdued music to come. What Parks achieves with her songwriting is to turn the intimate into the general, and vice versa. Writing so effortlessly and affectionately about the subjects of her lyrics, one would be easily fooled into thinking she was singing them just for you. Take, for example, the standout track ‘Caroline’. What starts as an almost voyeuristic observation of a couple’s fight on the street turns into the breathy, repeated chorus of ‘suddenly he started screaming, Caroline, I swear to God I tried, I swear to God I tried.’ The emotion in her voice makes one believe, for a sweet moment, that is not the man in the street who is screaming out for Caroline, but Parks herself.
Boundaries of selfhood are transgressed again and again throughout Sunbeams. In ‘Green Eyes’ she talks about how the Othering forces of homophobia can put a strain on a relationship, ‘Could not hold my hand in public / Felt their eyes judgin’ our love and beggin’ for blood’. This then bleeds into the chorus, again aimed perhaps more at her listeners than her lover, ‘Some of these folks wanna make you cry / But you gotta trust how you feel inside’. Her ability to offer pearls of wisdom and truisms about life doesn’t come across as precocious or preachy, they come as comforting signals sent out through headphones, the signals say: ‘I get it.’
While relatability is not the be-all and end-all of songwriting, in Sunbeams it transforms what would be a record about love and loss into a manifesto, a screengrab of being 20 in the 2020s. This approach lends itself brilliantly to the surprisingly catchy ‘Black Dog’, wherein Parks implores a loved one to ‘Just take your medicine and eat some food / I would do anything to get you out your room’.
Although it should be said that it is this quality of calm and peaceful relatability which makes certain tracks so engaging. When it is used in every song, it regrettably becomes somewhat tiring. Towards the end of the 40-minute-long album, the beats began to blend, subtly, into one. Her cool voice combined with the equally calm instrumentation, begins to congeal into one gloopy totality, making individual melodies more difficult to distinguish.
I am reminded of the saying ‘too much of a good thing’. With the deluxe edition comes eight extra songs from the ‘lo fi lounge’. Among them are serene covers of Clairo’s ‘Bags’, King Krule’s ‘Baby Blue’ and Frank Ocean’s ‘Ivy’. One can’t help but think that her hushed vocals are simply reimagining modern indie classics for their use in ‘Coffeeshop Study’ playlists. If anything can be described as a product of the upsurge in ‘chill’ indie music over the past decade it is definitely this album. This tendency to lean towards the mellow, however, does not take away from the achievement here. In and amongst the ‘buffers’ of the project are moments of true beauty and clarity. What raises Collapsed in Sunbeams from enervation is Parks’ honest and comforting lyricism and her masterful use of beautiful harmonies and melodies. My only advice: hire a new band.
