She avoids this trap here by playing with her delivery: on 'Maxim's I' and 'Maxim's II' she adopts an exaggerated, vaguely European accent, while in the first half of 'In The Green Wild' she resembles Joni Mitchell, her voice veering between conversational and singsong falsetto. Her lovely voice grows more confident with each album but it is on the thin side, and when pitched high it risks being smothered by its lush accompaniment. Instead, we only really see Holter, or the character that she is playing. Yet for all the album's richness and detail, there is little sense of the city's multiplicity. Occasionally the album does indeed get loud, but for the most part the new instrumentation gives the album a physical presence: percussion is often shunned in favour of keyboard and string swells, or pulsing trombone and saxophone, as on the aptly titled 'Horns Surrounding Me'. Each of these songs is a negative of the other, sharing lyrics but little else. On much of the album their contributions boost the sound, whether to jarring, claustrophobic effect as 'Maxim's II' spirals into dissonance, or providing a bed of soaring strings on 'Maxim's I'. This time around she had the budget to record in a studio, where she worked with a cast of horn and string players. And as an artist, she is individual in both senses: her music, with its ambition and abstruse references, reveals a distinct, unusual sensibility, and until now she has operated alone on most of her tracks. What occupies Holter is the place of the individual in the crowd and in society, especially the sometimes overwhelming version that is city life. The moment captures effectively the timeless dynamics of gossip and intrigue, but here it speaks for something more. The other diners are immediately silenced, and then start up their chattering again, exercised by what they have just seen. Holter was especially influenced by a scene from the film when Gigi enters the Paris restaurant Maxim's on the arm of a famous bachelor. On Loud City Song, her first full release on Domino, Holter has said that rather than "pulling songs out of self," she decided to "come at it from a different place and engage with society." If this is Holter's version of a state-of-the-nation album, her methods are unconventional: she has based it on Colette's 1944 novella Gigi and its glitzy Hollywood musical adaptation. This was intensely introspective music, born of the bedroom studio. And although she is a Los Angeles native and resident, her songs showed little sign of their urban origins. Her previous two releases, Tragedy and Ekstasis, were anything but brash – not restrained, exactly, because she drew on a well of emotion for moments of unexpected power, but they were mostly gentle, pensive albums. Loudness isn't a quality one associates with Julia Holter.
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