Laura Kerry
Lina Tullgren lives in Maine, away from the usual music hubs of Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Oakland or Los Angeles. But the artist has managed to find a musical community that includes her parents (her mother is trained in flute and baroque theory and her father raised her on jazz), her collaborator Ty Ueda, and a shifting group of other talented musicians. She is certainly not alone up there in the north.
In her debut LP, however, Tullgren seems transfixed by solitude. Won features Ueda and three other collaborators playing more than a few different instruments, but Tullgren’s voice stands out, raw and evocative. More expressive than pretty in most songs, it leads the way through soul-bearing indie rock songs about growing up, losing and keeping relationships, and loneliness. Tullgren’s voice seems to emerge unmediated from her thoughts and feelings.
Many of those thoughts and feelings are tinged with sadness. Throughout Won, Tullgren sings about the risks of opening up and the challenges of some friendships. “My heart on a string / Doesn’t mean anything,” she sings in “Fitchburg State,” and “What does it mean to wear your heart on your sleeve?” in “Red Dawn.” She asks many questions in the album (a fact acknowledged in “Face Off” with the lines, “I have more questions now / Do you know what love looks like?”), and the phenomenon seems to relate to another theme in Won: the lost feeling that comes in leaving childhood behind. Tullgren sums it up nicely with the seamless coopting of the Bob Dylan lyric, “I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now” (“Slow”).
Not all of Won is so straightforwardly melancholy, though. Dissonant and off-kilter elements create intriguing tension in the album. In standouts such as “Asktell,” “Red Dawn,” and “Summer Sleeper,” Tullgren perfectly balances plainly beautiful songwriting with more unconventional touches. “Asktell” occasionally erupts in bright and discordant bursts over its foundational moody pulse; “Red Dawn,” slower and more reflective, is woozy with its wash of distortion and loose guitar; and “Summer Sleeper” sounds like sad, twisted Beach Boys (appropriate for its central message, “I’ll stay home where I am safe / Sleep all summer”). None of the tracks on Won are overly dense or complicated, but the band manages to tease out interesting dynamics through unexpected but simple interplay between parts.
Lina Tullgren’s debut is full of contradictions. For an artist who writes and sings so deftly about wanting to retreat from friendships, she works remarkably well with her collaborators. For an album that reflects on the woes of opening up, it is remarkably intimate and candid. And for a debut, it is notably elegant and wise.