Review: Kris Delmhorst “Long Day in the Milky Way”

Kris Delmhorst shines her light from and toward the darkness on new LP “Long Day in the Milky Way” 

Kris Delmhorst’s latest record seems to find her struggling with something like an existential conundrum: to function within the space the world has made, or go about undoing it, even if at one’s own peril.

“How we gonna carry all the things that we know/A pound of feathers or a pound of stones/that shit gets heavier further you go/Can you leave it lying by the side of the road” she asks on “Flower of Forgiveness,” and it seems a fitting encapsulation of the question Long Day in the Milky Way is asking.

Luckily for her listeners, this seems somehow to be Delmhorst’s comfort zone: magnifying both the apertures through which we construct and are constructed by the world and the complexities of our behavior — what we do to one another, what we do to ourselves, and what we do with what we are given.

The songs on this record attest to the darkness that’s to be found, but Delmhorst writes with such prodigious insight and earnest seeking that her songs always allow for the maximum passage of light. These songs hold lived experience without nullifying the sanctity of it, without running roughshod over the specificity of it. They capture with such precision the ways in which we are fraught and fragile in the face of the anxiety lurking beneath daily life, yet we are not closed off from the possibility of something like grace.

Delmhorst is here, as ever, at the top of her game, peerless.

Kris Delmhorst

Long Day in the Milky Way
Northampton, MA
(CEN/The Orchard)
Produced by Kris Delmhorst // Mixed by Sam Kassirer // Mastered by Alex McCollough

For more info, visit www.krisdelmhorst.com