I KEEP MY FEET ON THE FRAGILE PLANE

Description

"I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane" – the fourth album by Allegra Krieger and her first with Double Double Whammy – is her most mature and captivating work to date. It contains all the hallmarks of her best lyricism: delicate and precise phrasing, moments that oscillate between beauty and banality, a meaning that forms through the accumulation of observations, memories, and unexpected adages. It is an album that is both post-theistic and dedicated to a relationship with the divine, each song flickering in and out of the "fragile plane," a place that Krieger describes as "a common ground in the universe," both abstract and peaceful, where time, bodies, and names do not exist. Krieger initially collaborated with Luke Temple and Jeremy Harris to record her voice and guitar on tape at Panoramic Studios in West Marin, California. As the album took shape, Krieger envisioned instruments – such as the French and English horns (Nancy Ranger and Priscilla Reinhart), electric guitar (Jacob Drab), and pedal steel (Kevin Copeland) – as characters that would enter and exit the soundscape. What emerged from conversations with composer Sammy Weissberg were brass parts that have a dark, almost surreal logic: the brass bursts forth to emphasize a word or phrase, drops out completely, only to rush back in with dissonant orchestrations that gesture simultaneously toward decay and generation. While Krieger draws inspiration from the honesty of Elliot Smith, the cosmic scope of Judee Sill, and the sharp observation of Joni Mitchell, the dreamlike association, harmonic dissonance, and angular melodic ascents of each song are uniquely and delightfully hers. "I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane" is a bold collection of songs from an artist who cries out with both the cold glass eye of truth and the beating heart of empathy; who depicts life in all its twisted complexities.