Reinventions were kind of a popular theme in 2014. Notably, Taylor Swift made the leap from savvy pop-country artist to savvy pop artist who reigned supreme in sales, and Matthew McConaughey shed his (mostly) naked, bongo-beating stoner image to become one of the great actors of his generation.
While those transitions were somewhat logical — perhaps even expected — the transformation experienced by Brooke Fraser last year was considerably more radical. Following a trio of successful, innocuous folk-pop albums, Fraser re-emerged in 2014 with Brutal Romantic, a collection of dark, nervy electronica that doesn't easily invite reductive descriptors like "organic" or "rootsy."
A bona fide star in her native New Zealand, Fraser originally broke through to mass audiences more than a decade ago with 2003's What to Do With Daylight, a collection of largely organic, vaguely Christian tunes that started her down the path to becoming one of her country's biggest-selling artists. She followed that with Albertine in 2006, then Flags in 2011. The former featured the award-winning single "Something in the Water," a Mumford-esque ditty with one of those ubiquitous whoa-whoa choruses.
While Fraser could very well have ridden that tried-and-true stadium-folk formula for the rest of her career, for Brutal Romantic she elected instead to make a clean break. She wrote all over the globe — Sydney, Stockholm and even an island in the Baltic Sea — and enlisted intrepid English producer David Kosten (Bat for Lashes). The singer left her acoustic guitar packed away for the recording sessions.
The results feel right of this time, wrestling with identity and shape-shifting relationships in the shadow of technology. On album opener "Psychosocial," Fraser taps a robotic-sounding gospel choir to rant against people's growing tendency to confuse online interaction for actual connection. "I want a cliché I can click on cue," she sings, sounding resigned.
The album's lead single, "Kings & Queens," is a sonic cousin to Taylor Swift's 1989 standout "Style": a throbbing synth bassline drives the atmospheric verses about uncertainty and self-discovery before the song explodes into technicolor refrains that would make Passion Pit green with envy. "Bloodrush" tackles similar subject matter, building to a danceable climax and encouraging listeners to press on through the tough times.
While Fraser was never a hard-line evangelical in her earlier work, there was always a spiritual bent that spoke to her devout Christian beliefs. On Romantic, however, it's mostly absent. "Je Suis Pret," for example, marries a cavernous trip-hop beat to some Kate Bush-worthy vocal acrobatics and lyrics referencing a "storm" and "healing." Likewise, "New Histories," with its reverb-ringing lead guitar lines, reads as both a statement about a lover or the mystery of God.
The album's centerpiece title track is a knotty meditation on relationships and mortality that swells from tranquil symphonic brass to a dense wall of sound that threatens to swallow everything. It's a fitting backdrop for a set of oblique lyrics that question how and why we continue to enter new relationships when it's all fated to end in tears anyway. Fraser doesn't try to provide an answer.
Best guess? Courage — the same kind that compels a successful artist to abandon everything she's known and forge a completely new artistic identity.
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