Cassandra Jenkins - My Light, My Destroyer Review
An intimate reflection on resilience, blending ethereal melodies with everyday epiphanies.
Cassandra Jenkins' brilliant 2021 breakthrough album, An Overview on Phenomenal Nature is an album that paints vivid pictures and scenes. On the album’s best song, Hard Drive, Jenkins bumps into a friend, Peri, who, with one look sees that Jenkins has had “a rough few months”. Peri goes on to reassure her “We’re going to put your heart back together / So all those little pieces they took from you / They’re coming back now / They’ll miss them too”. One, two, three years later Jenkins’ world is one that continues to be pieced together through her concise, thoughtful songs which, on My Light, My Destroyer, are bigger and often more turbulent.
On Petco, with its 90s guitar that sounds like King Krule with a kind of Blur goofiness thrown in, Jenkins sings of swapping her drum machine for a “heart shaped duct tape wallet”. On Tape and Tissue, that has the diffident spookiness of Portishead, she sings of “bows made of scotch tape and tissue” and a “house built of glue and popsicle sticks”. On the sweepingly brilliant Only One she sees a “stick figure Sisyphus behind massage-parlor glass”.
There is a Sisyphus like quality that runs through the album. On Delphinium Blue, a late addition to the album, noticeably darker but retaining enough of the sonic thread that runs through the rest of the record - it sounds like Arctic Monkeys’ Sculptures of Anything Goes with some of the pomp and ghoulishness knocked out of it, Jenkins chants a mantra to herself while working at a flower shop “Chin up / Stay on task / Wash the windows / Count the cash” while thorns fall from roses and narcissus bloom around her.
But this is not a record that takes place in small confines. In fact, at times it takes place almost on another planet all together. On Aurora, IL where a chugging guitar, ethereal synths and gliding strings are kept in check by Jenkins’s masterful, wispy voice, William Shatner flies to space on a rocket ship. On Omakase she sings that her light is also her destroyer and her meteorite. Betelgeuse is a three minute recorded conversation of Jenkins and her mother planet spotting and star gazing from their New York apartment.
Betelguese is an extended interlude on the record, which despite just being just under 37 minutes in total, squeezes in four more of these. Shatner’s Theme is an intersection of insect chirping and whistling. Music?? sounds like an overheard conversation in a checkout line. Attente Telephonique is a telephone conversation in French, with jazz club music in the background. In an album that so often reaches for the stars, the effect is to rebalance, to pause and to listen to the small moments that break up each day.
Whether space has the answers to Jenkins’ questions is unclear, because on My Light, My Destroyer she has plenty of them. Barely a track skips without a question asked to herself. Jenkins queries how long she can stare at her ceiling before it kills her, if she is too late, what her true nature is and whether she can take care of anything or anyone. But,as if acknowledging Hard Drive, on Omakase, with tentative synths and jazz breezes, Jenkins sings “Pull me apart / Put me back together”. As if to confirm any fix is temporary, as is any break.