jennylee - right on!

Pitchfork 73

Her inventive bass playing grounds Warpaint’s lush, painterly compositions, so it’s little wonder that Jenny Lee Lindberg (aka jennylee)’s first solo album, right on!, is both spacious and intimate. More focused than the last Warpaint record, right on! is subtle, with the softness and density of cashmere. It owes quite a bit to '80s and '90s goth-leaning college rock but thankfully never feels like a direct tracing thereof. It’s a good record for the winter, reflecting long nights, and the search for comfort and safety, the desire to wrap ourselves in layers.

Where right on! sticks its landings—which it does more often than it falters—it’s in the moments where Lindberg’s bass work drives her songwriting. "boom boom" is a constant, tense pulse, a stutter in the chest; "never" has a classic goth club-floor feel. "bully", with its central, just-vague-enough threat of "I’m not playing around", moves like a shadow behind a theater scrim. "riot" has noise and discord at its core, with Lindberg’s howl buried in the mix and played to perfectly disturbing effect. It’s easy to overplay your hand with horror, the line between terror and corniness divided by camp, but that watery scream is genuinely scary.

The couple of tracks that meander, though, are frustrating. "blind" is a bleak highway drive to nowhere. "long lonely winter" begins with promise, articulating the flatness of isolating depression with remarkable accuracy, but trails off in layers of synth and desert haze. "he fresh" feels more like sketch than song. But right on! is an immaculately produced record—again, not a surprise from a member of a relatively technical band known for their attention to detail. It’s rare to hear a solo album by a bass player that highlights that instrument’s primacy but doesn’t feel overly filigreed. The bass is the butt of jokes; the bass is the instrument people pick in movies when the other rock instruments are taken, and so bassists often feel like they have to overcompensate. Lindberg, thankfully, never falls into that trap. Her voice as an artist, as brought to highlight via production decisions, feels uncluttered and distinct.