Grace Givertz - Midnight Feature
With Midnight Feature, Grace Givertz punctures the heart and gives us a "remarkable stretch of storytelling. It doesn't get much better than this," Bee Delores writes.
The way Grace Givertz sings punctures the heart in an extraordinary way. “ It's like a yodel, but it's not,” she says. “It sounds like it should be uncomfortable, but it is a really comfy spot for my voice, and I love it.” Such a vocal vehicle stitches her new album, Midnight Feature, together with needle-like precision, particularly in songs like "Black Belt," in which she calls out a progressive white man's fragile ego, and "Sick Beats." She mourns the death of a relationship throughout the record, singing, in the latter song, "You gave your heart to me / Took mine with you when you decided to leave me."
Givertz peels back the layers of her raw, throbbing nerve endings. It's a cathartic exercise. And it's riddled with a universal, yet deeply, savagely personal, pain that can only be exorcised for her to be truly free. "Did you hear about the songs I wrote about you?" she ponders in "Two Years," a delicately drawn sketch about the ghosts harbored forever in music. "Love letters on the air, and nd I pray they found you / And I just hope you know how much I love you..."
Midnight Feature opens up with the string-bound, cinematic title track that could be found on the soundtrack of a real tearjerker drama. "I think I'm outgrowing the pain," sings Givertz. All her misery that once tore through her body is now on full display, with some director somewhere exploiting her heart's sorrowful fault line for their own amusement. "Throwing popcorn at the screen / I can't believe I let them do this shit to me," she boos. "If it were up to me, this D-list would have gone straight to DVD."
In turning her despair into a final curtain call, she bids farewell to that brokenness. “I just started singing, ‘There’s no encore,’” Givertz notes about how the song came down like a bolt of lightning. “That was the moment I was just like, 'It's over. It's done. It wasn't a movie, and we're human beings, and life sucks sometimes, and sometimes it doesn't work out.'"
Givertz turns to accomplished musician, Jake Blount, for the profound, socially earth-moving closer, "America," in which she sings an ode to a disastrous United States of America. "Grew up in the house that my grandad built for me," Blount sings. "The walls stood as his papers to America the free."
He continues, shredding the white supremacist systems that still (and perhaps will forever) keep Black people, Brown people, and people of color held at arm's length. "But we'll never be equals / No, we'll never be free 'cause your hatred sticks to you like my Black skin sticks to me." That's the nature of a country forged on the backs of Black people on slave ships—and it's actually not that long ago, despite what whitewashed history books will tell you.
Grace Givertz's Midnight Feature tears down methods of oppression as much as it does the self-imposed prisons of heartache and grief. It's a remarkable stretch of folk storytelling. It doesn't get much better than this.
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