With their minimal yet potent ingredients — voice, piano and Telecaster through an armada of effects pedals — Julien Baker's 2015 debut Sprained Ankle and 2017 follow-up Turn Out the Lights offered comfort food for troubled souls. Her third, Little Oblivions, does too, but more colorfully. On the album, released in late February, the Memphis-raised, Nashville-based songsmith — off the road for the first time in her young career and feeling listless, lonely and self-destructive — confronts her sorrow with full-band arrangements, a grittier sonic palette and a wider range of dynamics in both directions, quiet and loud.
In lieu of a proper in-person release show, Baker brought the album to life with a kinetic, cathartic full-length performance taped last month at Nashville's Analog at Hutton Hotel and broadcast Thursday night via Audiotree. At the top of the set, Baker referred to the show as the release gig for her new album, then corrected herself to highlight bassist and co-producer Calvin Lauber's contribution, and introduce the rest of her crackerjack band: guitarist Mariah Schneider, keyboard player Noah Forbes and longtime drummer Matthew Gilliam.
The silver cross pendant around Baker's neck nodded to her Christian faith, which is part and parcel to her artistic identity. But as a queer Southerner, her relationship with religion is admittedly fraught, a work in progress manifested in her music. Like her emo-core forebears Pedro the Lion and Sunny Day Real Estate, she sings of spirituality but never in absolutist ways, tying it in with more universal struggles: falling in and out of love, feeling out of step with the world, resisting, or caving to, vices.
Those bands and their iconic frontmen (Pedro the Lion's David Bazan, SDRE's Jeremy Enigk) also act as reference points for Baker's band's potent live sound. Onstage at the Hutton, the quintet rallied around Baker's tumult-filled vocals — known to shift on a dime from a low whisper to an anguished, lovesick howl — with careful buildups, breakdowns and textural reinforcements. From Schneider's subtle vocal harmonizing and twinkling six-string interplay with Forbes' keys, to Lauber's melodic high-register bass lines and Gilliam's finessed fills and cymbal swells, the song-serving arrangements freed Baker to toggle between lead and rhythm, her trusty Tele and an electric-acoustic.
The 50-minute set consisted of 10 songs from Little Oblivions, plus Turn Out the Lights' title tune and, for the die-hards, “Tokyo,” from a 2019 Sub Pop single. The sequencing felt thoughtfully considered, with a natural push-and-pull between musically sparse, lyrically self-lacerating valleys (“Ringside,” the solo-piano “Song in E”) and ecstatic peaks (“Highlight Reel,” “Hardline,” “Ziptie”) where the band thrashed about in unison, Explosions in the Sky-style. Baker is a leading voice in an emotionally tuned-in generation, and the pathos of her music occasionally verges on overwhelming on record. Given the full-band treatment in a live setting, however, it took on a new multidimensionality. Both sonically and lyrically, it articulated not wallowing, but fighting onward.
