Asher White - New Excellent Woman
Whether it's through repurposing everyday sounds and objects (see “Modern Guilt”) or impassioned lyrics (“New Excellent World”) , White’s innovation is constant.
Asher White is always tinkering with a newer, more exciting sound. Sitting on the edge of each of her songs is something extravagant, provoking you to listen again and again until you’ve heard everything and still crave more. In “New Excellent Woman”, each song’s rapid ascension into refreshing musicianship mirrors the newness in White’s own life. It feels like welcoming back the sun in the summer; a new season, new beginning, new world, and new identity.
Opening track “Ptolemy” is named after a Roman astronomer who proposed that the sun, along with other planets, revolved around the Earth. He also wrote about optics in what have been described as “obscure” explanations of illusions and theories of visions. We know now that he was wrong, but at one time his theories were a best bet and necessary in the trail leading to the truth. Listening to this 9 track project is to constantly be learning a lesson from the world around you; what better way is there to start than with disillusionment wrapped in a barely 5 minute yet ever progressing package.
What should be overstimulating is perfectly measured in an Asher White song. Her ability to matchmake chaos and consistency is a defining theme in this new album. Take “Tresemme Instrumental” for example. It enters the room with an eye-of-the-storm gentleness formed by beachy guitar and remnants of 80s-like synth. The center is where it reaches an unexpected peak, suddenly swarmed with the distortion of whining guitars and electric feedback. By the end you’re back where you started and probably wondering if you flipped to the next song by accident– but you didn’t. What you’ve just witnessed is actually a witty manifestation of White’s identity as a both queer and transgender woman on her art: “My music is queer less in thematic or direct references and more in form: I try to keep it dynamic, elastic, and unfixed (like all of our gender identities!)”
In “Mare”, White’s storytelling is folk-like, traced excitedly with banjo and other twangy guitar patterns. It feels like walking into a million rooms at once, with bells chiming on the door above you and the energy of its inhabitants slowly intertwining with yours. She describes it as “sort of an elegy for having fun in real-time, an acknowledgement that the experience of being young and mobile and romantic is fleeting and conditional”.
There’s something enchanting about White’s voice towards the end of the album where they break from the curious frenzy of previous instrumentations to capture some of our most innate emotions. Strings are an essential to building the beauty of “Garden” , seemingly an ode to desire through the repetition of the same line: “Everything I want, everything I want”. The track does feel open, like sitting outside in a park (or garden), but at the same time gives the impression of seeing these things from a window and wishing you were out there instead.
Whether it's through repurposing everyday sounds and objects (see “Modern Guilt”) or impassioned lyrics (“New Excellent World”) , White’s innovation is constant. These songs have personality in a way that both combines and bends the traditions of many different genres, leaving you in a constant state of anticipation and curiosity. This album, which she has described as “about traipsing around densely historical places in the northeast”, is the perfect soundtrack for a walk around town and bringing life to the people, places, and feelings encountered in everyday life.