Every so often a dance record comes out that reaffirms my faith in what the genre is capable of. Most pop music is enjoyable enough, but the formula usually works because the bar for satisfaction is already at an all-time low. It’s rare that a project like Written Into Changes spills onto my lap, but Avalon Emerson’s latest awakens in me a joy I usually only feel when I’m watching a pitcher twirl the pill under summer stadium lights: in awe of the motion, the rhythm, and the velocity. It’s a hundred details working in flawless tandem. By the time she sings the lines “I can cut up the language written into changes, looking for a crack of light to crawl my way out” on the title track, Written Into Changes is already a tremendous pop project with serious legs, groove, and refinement.
Dance music sometimes succumbs to its own tackiness, but whimsy is the engine that powers Emerson’s seamless potion of textures. Written into Changes is heady, swirly, and exceptionally paced, never woolgathering but imbuing dramatic feelings into dramatic rhythms. Emerson—a techno-DJ-turned-songwriter born in Arizona, once based in Berlin and LA, and now stationed in upstate New York—uses her globe-trotting background as a tool, as her palette loiters in many realms: ‘80s gothtronica (“God Damn (Finito)”), Bristol jangle-pop (“Jupiter and Mars”), ‘90s West Coast alt-rock (“Country Mouse”), ‘00s dance-punk (“Eden”) and twee (“How Dare This Beer”). She sings of Roman myths, the solar system, seasons flowing into each other, and beer as ephemera while recalling the electronic impulses of Cocteau Twins and Caroline Polachek, the trance smarts of Romy, and the tactile retro of U.S. Girls and Nilüfer Yanya. There’s even a touch of intercontinental affectation in her singing that’s just sideways enough to be labeled “twang.”
One can locate pockets of ebullience in Emerson’s debut album, & the Charm, but Written into Changes has far more range, eclecticism, and miniature tragedy in its cosmos. It’s equal parts Studio 54 tribute and dream-pop banger, equal parts past and present talking to each other. “Happy Birthday” makes dubby callbacks to Emerson’s history of remixing, while “God Damn (Finito)” acts as a Todd Terje-shaped portal into “Obsession” by Animotion before getting flanked by a sultry horn and house groove outro. “Wooden Star” takes a similar pivot, falling into an ostentatious, industrial darkwave collapse mid-song. Not many ravers moonlight as underground popstars on royal indie labels.
Her nocturnal knowledge of Italo disco, English electrofunk, and sampledelia peaks through on “Wooden Star” and “God Damn (Finito),” bending typical pop flows into exciting, exotic, even coarse directions. The baggy synths in the Rostam Batmanglij-assisted “Jupiter and Mars,” one of the best songs of the year so far, lend her feathery vox a sun-kissed, Ray of Light-style gloss. “How Dare This Beer” is bathed in reverb but never smothered by it. Emerson sedates her harder-faster dance music instincts on “I Don’t Want to Fight” with a squawky, humid guitar hook. Written into Changes is great dance-pop music written by somebody who has historically excelled at the “dance” part (“Country Mouse” is a firecracker). But Emerson writes like hell, too.
Tap into “Eden” and you’re met by bass slaps, room-tilting drums, and splashy synths. The song is huge and funky, as nourished by Stevie Wonder as it is LCD Soundsystem. But then Emerson emerges, trying to repair a relationship once derailed by self-sabotage (“Guide that wheel out on the highway, and we can make each other happy / Once your good-time girl, now I remember everything”). Where she winds up, on the wrong side of her own thoughtlessness, is contrasted by whopping production and a sublime image of romance. “Written into Changes,” suspended in air like the Valley Curtain, is either a doorway or a postcard, offering the album’s best glimpse of psychedelic detail: “Vanity bonfire, red-orange glowing tinsel and tin tattoos into my skin / Your birthday tomorrow, under my old balcony light.” Emerson also gets clever with her craft, talking about being “too young to die, too old to break through” in the glib chorus of “Happy Birthday.”
But mostly, Avalon Emerson’s phrases and transportive electropop backings walk down the same strange, celestial paths as Stephin Merritt and Arthur Russell. That part of her DNA becomes a phantom on closer “Earth Alive” when guitars wrap around muggy breakbeats and her brief but tender, sobering nostalgia (“Dead radio, summer glow / I miss my friends, too, when I’m alone / Wet July, starry night / I just hope I see you on this earth alive”). She sounds a long way from the phoneless dancefloors of Berghain, but Written into Changes is proof that her magic goes far beyond the turntables. Every song here has high replay value. Emerson gets better the longer you listen to her. [Dead Oceans]
Matt Mitchell is the editor of Paste. They live in Los Angeles.
