Corrina Repp - How a Fantasy Will Kill Us All (2018)

On her fifth full-length album, How A Fantasy Will Kill Us All, songwriter Corrina Repp charts a path through the unknown. Fueled by a desire to start over and make a clean break with Portland, where she’d lived for 21 years, and where she released a string of albums on HUSH and Mark Kozelek’s Caldo Verde label, played with her band Tu Fawning, and appeared semi-regularly on the parody comedy series Portlandia, Repp headed across the country. The promise of a new relationship was waiting for her, but it wasn’t to be. Turning away from the failed relationship after three weeks, Repp made survival a full-time occupation. Stowing her possessions in a storage unit in Woodland Hills, California, and leaving with no real plan, Repp embarked on a nomadic journey that would shade her music for years to come.

The songs on the new record came together over two fitful, unrooted years that found her working at the Sou’Wester motor lodge on the coast of Washington, staying at the Saint-Erme-Outre-et-Ramecourt convent in Northern France where she dedicated herself to playing music, writing songs in a sublet in Los Angeles, and finally, in Louisville, Kentucky, where she holed up with Danny Seim of Menomena to record this album. Recording during the day and retiring to a small, cold room each night with Phil, a stray cat and bad TV box sets to keep her company, Repp found herself drawn to freedom in ways she’d never experienced it. She made friends with Richard Sullivan, an ex-ball player turned painter. She went to parties and art galleries. She spent large swaths of time by herself. These experiences blurred into her art. Built on foundational loops and drones, Repp’s songs mingle solid, folk-tinged melodies with distortion, kaleidoscopic pop, and disjointed, cobbled together beats. She buries her resonant anthems under hiss (“Nothing Is On,” “Look For Paradise”), navigates uncertainty with eerie confidence (“Need You / Don’t Need You,” “Lightest Light”) and makes her proclamations of independence sound like faithful hymns (“I’ll Take The Storm”). Sometimes she sounds like a gospel singer, sometimes she sounds like a slightly malfunctioning tape deck, but always, she sounds free.