Clairo has come a long way from making bedroom pop in a Syracuse dorm. Listening to Charm, her third album, the only remnants from those early viral days are Clairo’s steady, feathery vocals. Everything else has transformed, her synthesizers and electronic beats traded for naturalistic instrumentation. Sling, her quietly intimate, Jack Antonoff-produced retreat into the Catskill woods, was a change of pace. With Charm, she’s fully embracing an organic, earthbound sound.
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This time, Clairo enlisted Leon Michels of El Michels Affair and Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings behind the boards, who recruited a handful of session musicians to record Charm (mostly) live to tape. The resulting record is undeniably pretty, with moments of majesty and tenderness. But Charm’s passivity can be a challenge; despite the continued focus on instrumentation and analog recording, Charm does not feel like a risk for Clairo. It doesn’t really feel like anything.
It’s almost surprising to hear that the album was recorded with a massive emphasis on live instrumentation, because it sounds like human error was not allowed into the equation. There’s not a hair out of place on Charm, and it’s certainly owed to Michels’ and the session musicians’ experienced ears as well as Clairo’s decisive arrangements. Charm attempts to feel lived in via record scratches, comforting vocals, and nostalgic, vintage instruments. But those elements suggest “lived in” in an Urban Outfitters way, not in a way that reflects Clairo’s personal and professional transformation.
Charm does demonstrate some maturity — for one, she definitely lends more specificity to her musical arrangements. There’s a delicate balance between syncopated instrumentation and more sweeping, legato modes; “Terrapin” features flourishes of a jazzy piano dancing all around the track, “Second Nature” adds some cartoonish “hum-dum” refrains into the mix, and “Echo” finds some satisfying interplay between a whirling vintage synth and some fingerpicked guitar.
Other than in “Echo,” there’s hardly any guitar on Charm, as the indie rock hue of her debut Immunity and the loopy Antonoff-esque guitar on Sling are stricken from the mix. Instead, Charm is a piano album through and through, helping Clairo achieve the kind of classically-aided sound she sought out. Michels’ work also looms large throughout, his adeptness at imbuing soul into a variety of genres adding some much-needed character to the record.
