Cassandra Jenkins - "An Overview On Phenomenal Nature"
Words by Zach Romano.
Cassandra Jenkins wrote the songs on her stunning new album An Overview on Phenomenal Nature while going through a rough stretch in 2019. Like many of us, she was crushed and profoundly shaken when David Berman died in August of that year, but unlike most, she had recently gotten to know him well as a member of what was supposed to be the Purple Mountains touring band. To top that off, she had just learned of a genetic condition that predisposes her to cancer. Over seven gorgeous, airy but lyrically dense tracks, the album documents her coming to terms with these hardships and putting it back together. Jenkins has been a fixture on the NYC scene for years and has played in bands with anyone and everyone, but she beautifully steps into the spotlight here; An Overview on Phenomenal Nature is a must-listen.
From an album addressing healing and recovery with “Phenomenal Nature” in the title, I went in expecting something Walden-y, about escape from others and introspection. This is not that; maybe it’s the opposite of that. Nature – whether the ocean off Norway (“New Bikini”) or that one part of Central Park where you can’t see any buildings (“The Ramble”) – plays a role for Jenkins, but the real mechanisms of healing are the people in her life, whether good friends offering encouragement and solace or strangers with unexpected insights. Like former tour-mate Craig Finn, Jenkins populates her songs with idiosyncratic, instantly memorable characters. Where Finn’s characters seem to be fictional or at least amalgamations of people he’s known, though, Jenkins’s are real, named people from her life. From Darryl, her driving instructor who asks her how she’s dealing with anxiety, to a bookstore employee who gives her an impromptu lecture on “chakras, the ascended masters, and the astral plane” (both on “Hard Drive”), everyone has a part to play.
The album oscillates from an ambling rock reminiscent of Masterpiece-era Big Thief to sepia atmospheres that immediately recall Destroyer’s Kaputt. Though sonically similar, the effect of Jenkins’s use of synth textures and saxophones that sound like they’re coming from an apartment down the hall is completely different than Destroyer’s: where Dan Bejar uses the sense of nostalgia that these sounds invoke to convey a reclined, jaded looking back from someone who has seen it all, in Jenkins’s hands they are something familiar and centering: somewhere to rest, somewhere to build back from.
Jenkins stays low in her register through the album for the most part, and at times it feels like she is whispering a secret in your ear. Her lyrics are straightforward and often touching: “New Bikini” tells the story of how two completely unrelated people in her life gave her the same advice, and how later, she passed it along to another friend in need. It’s very sweet.
She also has a knack for one-liners: “I’m a three-legged dog, looking for what I lost,” she sings on album opener “Michelangelo.” It’s a great line but perhaps one that doesn’t entirely track, and Jenkins’s relationship with this metaphor is a summation of the album as a whole: “I later ended up meeting a lot of three-legged dogs, and realizing from watching them that actually, a three-legged dog is never looking for what they lost. They are playing Frisbee; they are running down the street,” she told Tom Gallo in her upcoming LAMR interview. “They adjust their gait; their physiology, their psychology changes to adjust to that imbalance, and they find balance again.”
An Overview on Phenomenal Nature is out now via Ba Da Bing. You can purchase it on limited edition vinyl via Bandcamp. Look out for Tom’s interview with Cassandra Jenkins to hear a lot more about how this awesome album came into being. Keep up with her via Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
