Album of the Week: Allegra Krieger

Allegra Krieger is no stranger to change. She has spoken about how she abruptly left a very focused path—music school in Boston—for a markedly more aimless one that sounds straight out of Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickled and Dimed: harvesting olives, planting trees, cleaning motel rooms, waiting tables. But she never lost her connection to music and, now settled in New York City, has prolifically produced four albums in four years.

The latest comes less than a year after the compelling I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane, having been sparked by an unwanted flash of inspiration—surviving a fatal fire. Krieger managed to make it out of her Chinatown apartment after an e-bike shop on the first floor burst into flames, but four of her neighbors didn’t. It’s a tragedy she exorcizes in “One or the Other.” “Nancy from the second floor died/ On her bed with an open door/ She tried to get out, but must have turned around,” she sings on the quiet, affecting country-folk track before it blossoms into a feverish plea: “What do you know about living?/ What do you know about dying?” Losing her home but not her life was a wake-up call of sorts for Krieger, who told Rolling Stone, “I’ve spent a lot of time in my life feeling very dark about being alive at all … The true thing I felt, right after it happened, [was that] I was so thankful that I made it out of there.” Which is not to say she’s suddenly singing hosannas; more that it’s made her even more introspective about what she’s doing here.

The affecting and slightly off-kilter “Came” channels whitechocolatespaceegg-era Liz Phair as Krieger wrestles with the elation and dependent darkness that alcohol can bring—a temporary fix for the “unraveling sense that you’re going nowhere.” Letting the folky melody play out for a minute, the guitars and drums then crash in and then stumble, a musical approximation of drunkenness, as Krieger screams, “Now you’re a star or a god or a flame/ Fuck where you’re going, forget from where you caaaaaaame.” Krieger sounds like a descendent of Sandy Denny on “Where You Want to Go,” as she melds together stories of suicide (“Morning came with the hope of lifting the weight off your feet with a rope”) and a life in the music industry (“And they’ll take a cut but it’s money well spent/ if they take you where you want to go”). It all builds to an anxious jam, guitar and drum like caged animals desperate to be freed. There’s a No Depression crunch to “Never Arriving,” equipped with wonderfully dirty guitar. Krieger traces a delicate, sylvan melody on “Burning Wings” and “How Do You Sleep?” turns from a gentle shuffle to a vivid guitar buzz as she ponders: “How do you sleep with all of that noise?”