LABEL: Dead Oceans
VINYL RELEASE DATE: 9/22/2017
ORIGINAL RELEASE DATE: 2017
VARIANT: Black Vinyl LP
...Phoebe Bridgers has been busy with Better Oblivion Community Center, a new collaborative project with Conor Oberst, and that's a great fit, as Phoebe is kind of the Conor Oberst of her generation. With Bright Eyes, Conor gave young people around the world hushed singer/songwriter songs that captured all of the uncontrollable emotions they were dealing with, and with her 2017 debut album Stranger in the Alps (which Conor also guests on), Phoebe did the same. Phoebe just has that ability to write songs where the words find clever ways to mirror universal feelings, and the melancholic melodies are the perfect vessel to deliver them with. When Phoebe sang "I have emotional motion sickness / Somebody roll the windows down," she came out with a line as iconic as anything any of the Away Message-era emo bands wrote in the previous decade. And that's far from the only quotable one-liner that Stranger has to offer. It's one of those albums where almost every song was my favorite at one point or another, and I imagine I'm not alone in feeling this. It established her as a masterful songwriter and a masterful interpreter -- when she covers Mark Kozelek's "You Missed My Heart" as the penultimate track, she not only entirely makes it her own, she may have bested the original. Though this list unsurprisingly has more bands than solo artists, emo needs that quiet singer/songwriter, that heartbreaker who gets thousands of people singing every word as if they were their own. In the 2010s, that singer/songwriter was Phoebe Bridgers.
Stranger in the Alps
TRACKLIST:
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1. Smoke Signals
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2. Motion Sickness
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3. Funeral
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4. Demi Moore
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5. Scott Street
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6. Killer
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7. Georgia
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8. Chelsea
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9. Would You Rather
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10. You Missed My Heart
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11. Smoke Signals (Reprise)
