I came across singer and songwriter Alexia Avina's discography recently and it captured me in a manner that I didn't expect. There is an intricateness to her approach to pop music that seems almost unreal. As in, how can something so carefully composed, also be so unassuming? It presents as if its gracefully pleated and waving folds were shaped by sheer accident without human intervention. Equivalent to a pearl in a crinkly clamshell that has washed ashore or a patch of bark that resembles a human face. A design without a designer. An unadulterated natural emergence. This ethereal tendency in her music has become more pronounced with time, reaching both its pinnacle, and possibly its disillusionment this year. While Alexia released her most petal-soft album early in 2022, she also demonstrated her favor for a flower's thorns with her most recent EP. The latter development is an intriguing rerouting of her project's course and one that might signal a new overall approach to her work. We won't know for sure until she releases another album, but I think it's worth unpacking the differences in her output this year all the same. So I'm going to compare her 2022 LP A Little Older with the Crush EP to get a better sense of where they diverge.
As you should anticipate from my description above, A Little Older is the maturation point of the ephemeral quality of Alexia's heretofore aesthetic. The album is centered on the interplay of her guitar playing and her voice, which is a typical configuration as far as these things go, only Alexia's voice is not just in the fore but in the background and suffused within the margin of these tracks as well. Her voice IS these tracks in a lot of ways- filling in the gaps with its widening sweep, interweaving with sparse percussion and her own redolent guitar playing like the wind catching blades of tall grass as it dashes across a prairie. It's like an untainted font of oxygen. You can't always feel it, but you also can't deny that it is there and swirling around you. It's interesting that many of these songs were apparently written as far back as 2018 and therefore may share some DNA with her debut Betting on an Island- a delicate guitar pop album in its own right, but one which is both more crowded and provincial than its present descendant. Looking back, the exceptional tenderness of A Little Older feels like the fulfillment of the promise of this earlier release.
Crush is of a different genus than its predecessor. Alexia's playing style and vocal performance are still recognizable, but they have been altered, becoming more direct and authoritative- the precision of her playing and the ambiance of her vocals both conscripted into playing more declarative roles. Less suggestive, more incisive; listening to Crush in reflection on the balnace of her past work, the impression builds that she had previously been in the process of weaving a cacoon for herself- from which she has now emerged, not as a butterfly, but something just as beautiful. So beautiful in fact, that you might not notice the stinger tucked between her variegated folds. I feel like when moving from acoustic guitar to synths, and in adopting a more cold and determined aesthetic overall, she has introduced a detectable measure of non-toxic venom into the elegant unveiling of her sound. A chiding, shrewdness that peers out from the darling facade like eyeholes cut into an embellished portrait of an oil painting. It is this forthright consciousness and observable canniness on Crush that serve as another layer of depth to her presentation and style and which strike out from the prettiness of these songs most noticeably. Crush feels like a literal sea change in this regard- as if it is no longer the ocean that carries the boat, but the boat that suspends itself on the ocean. It will be interesting to see if she remains in this channel, or what other fathoms she dives to on future releases.
Find it on Lost Map Records
