Pearla Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming

Pearla's music radiates with indiscriminate awe. Whether it's the befuddling depths of nature or the profoundly strange spark of a dreaming mind_she takes it all as equal magic. Her debut album is populated by eccentric creatures and quixotic scenes, her takes on mortality, intimacy, and personal freeness glowing with an air of mystique. 'Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming' is a world unto itself.Pearla's music is a rich blend, rooted in the folk canon of Neil Young or Joni Mitchell, embracing the darker quirks of a Connie Converse, Bjork, or Will Oldham, and pulsating with the emotional palpability of an Angel Olsen or Sharon Van Etten. Her recording process glitters with detail. Sentiment precedes every sound; she and her longtime collaborator/co-producer Tyler Postiglione craft melodies, structures, and experimental noises not to carry the lyrics, but to emphasize their meaning. On "Unglow The," Pearla engages her feverish imagination to grapple with the oddity of death. She equates a mountain's immensity with a body in a casket (all those things you can't wrap your mind around) in an attempt to fathom the unfathomable. The song's production sparkles chaotically as it builds into a psychedelic cacophony of shrieking horns and dissonant synths, conveying her internal unrest.Oh Glistening Onion_ artfully sways between the natural and the surreal. On the rollicking "About Hunger, About Love," Pearla suffers "a new kind of lonesome" and summons nature's omniscience: Nobody told the woodpecker to knock all day for bugs / So what should I know? What do I do for love? On the darkly explosive "The Place With No Weather," she wills herself free from earthly limitations into a bodiless projection, stable and indifferent. Her voice escapes its visceral vessel and reaches core-shaking peaks as she distantly echoes: You stole my universe. On "Funny In Dreams," she lifts off into stream-of-conscious light and puts forth some of her best questions_What's the opposite of a star anyway? / Are there places in...