Review Summary: i want to rearrange you
Big Sigh feels familiar. Familiarity is a strange concept: in spite of its positive connotations, inherently negative feelings like pain and anxiety are highly familiar to most of us - and yet, familiarity seems desirable. From its very first track, Marika Hackman's new album is tangibly comfortable navigating such contrasting feelings, even if this comfort is derived from years of discomfort.
At its core,
Big Sigh is a very good indie folk record. It's catchy and hooky in a low-key manner, it features brief brushes with more extravagant instrumentation, but above all, its songwriting is consistently excellent. At first, opening cut “The Ground”s two minutes of unwavering abstraction appears to be a red herring; especially as the subsequent “No Caffeine” constitutes both the kind of tune that feels like you've known for years as well as one of the most intriguing list-songs of recent times. However, the explicitly
strange opener starts making more sense as
Big Sigh unfolds and reveals its contradictory nature. The skeleton of almost every song is highly recognisable, affording the experience a warm, inviting atmosphere - one that Hackman is intent on bending, stretching, and, ever so gently, breaking.
The cracks in
Big Sigh’s fabric can be found throughout the album. It's in the themes of entrapment explored by the gentle “Hanging”, eventually embodied by its contextually abrasive conclusion. It's in the way “Please Don't Be So Kind” takes a simple tale of heartbreak and twists it into an equally simplistic and emotive piece that expands upon itself with each repeated line. It's in the way each explored theme contains, at the very least, traces of anguish and desperation, presented in inviting and deceptively accessible packages. Most notably, the mesmerising contrasts of
Big Sigh can be found in how the mostly abstractly electronic “Vitamins” embodies a genuine meditation on (self-)hatred and is followed by the oddly
funny opening lines of indie pop-banger “Slime”, the most playful and catchy moment of the album.
Ultimately,
Big Sigh lives and dies by its familiarity. It's an inviting listen and rather easy to enjoy the album's recognisable and unique elements alike - and yet, it's also easy to acknowledge that it could have benefitted from being more expansive. While the album does feel fairly boundless in scope due to its many small sonic experiments, it also kind of
ends after 35 minutes: there’s no grand reveal, conclusion, or climax to the overall experience. Perhaps that’s part of the point, though, but it’s hard not to feel like there could be a little more to
Big Sigh, a little more to Hackman. Regardless, there is a lot to be found in this excellent album if you allow it some time, give it some space and, while it may not be as easy as it seems, embrace its familiarity.
