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“If I put my shirt on backwards one more time, I swear,” Star Moles sings on “The End,” the cheekily titled opener of her new album Highway to Hell, “this will be the darkest Tuesday in a thousand years.” It’s a droll doorway into Emily Moales’ vision of quotidian apocalypse, a world of mundane misfortunes painted in cataclysmic colors where armageddon begins with “fighting the bagel machine.” Have you heard the bad news? Hell is haplessness, and Moales—armed with an upright piano, the voice of Weyes Blood and Anaïs Mitchell’s middle sibling, and bedroom pop chops earned in the trenches of GarageBand—has arrived to sing the underdog’s gospel from the gutter with all the found brilliance of an oil-spill rainbow.
A 10-track postcard from Hades-by-way-of-Philadelphia, Highway to Hell offers a weirdo slice of life on songs that slide from hook-heavy rock into intimate piano-driven compositions. These are psychedelic-of-center psalms about the (sur)realities of day-to-day life in your mid-twenties: losing $11 at the post office, bailing on parties, and trying to get that one person out of your head. It’s a grounded turn for Moales, whose previous high-concept, lo-fi work includes records inspired by medieval mating rituals, country-tinged suites of synth rock influenced by Arthurian legend, and an art pop side project about humanoid creatures in a dystopian swamp.
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On Highway to Hell, Moales dispenses with overtly fantastical influences: “Gone are the albums of knights and dragons,” she declares on a written foreword to the album’s Bandcamp release. It feels less a renouncement of her former whimsy than an acknowledgment of maturity’s knock: Now 26, Moales has put away childish things to write instead of jobs where all you do “is answer yes or no,” of days where “life flashes by/A quarter of an hour at a time.” Her narrators spend train rides pondering “how much of my life have I squandered.”
This isn’t to say Highway to Hell is devoid of magic or miracles— anything but. Finding the mysticism in pedestrian life requires artful transfiguration, which is Moales’ lyrical superpower. The annoying street canvassers Moales dodges in the bluesy, shifty “Day Off” are “vest-wearing archangels”; that shirt she puts on backwards turns her into “a beast of elbows and knees.” On “Factory Train,” a bewitching slow burn that carries the record into a second act of introspective ennui, Moales muses on loneliness above “the swamp at the end of the rainbow home to the oils of the earth.” Take off the Star Moles-vision goggles, and we might be simply overlooking a polluted river—but ferried along by Moales’ ghostly warble and cosmic eye, we transit alongside her through primordial waters.
Like its predecessors, Highway to Hell shrugs off professional pomp and polish—these songs are charmingly and self-consciously rough around the edges, with flubbed entrances and murmurs from the studio adding homemade heart. Producer Kevin Basko builds simple riffs and formidable piano lines into substantive set pieces for Moales’ voice, which can convey the same controlled chaos of Fiona Apple or Cameron Winter. (With its rambling, melancholy piano and limber vocals, “Control Freak” feels right at home with Winter’s “Drinking Age” or “$0”.) But where these artists possess a commanding confidence, Moales often sounds plucky, as if thrust forward to sing with her eyes shut tight at the world’s most eclectic karaoke night. The effect adds a groovy looseness to the faster tracks, and a wrenching quality to moodier songs like “Spinning,” an Adrianne Lenker-esque shaker-and-guitar love song where Moales confesses she’ll be content in the eyes of a lover so long as she isn’t invisible: “I’m happy if you see me at all.”
On “Control Freak,” Moales returns to this painfully relatable sentiment—that to be seen as pathetic or yearning is preferable to disappearing—turning it into a badge of honor: “My man makes me look like a fool and it’s beautiful,” she sings. “It’s a good look on me.” Highway to Hell reminds us that enduring humiliation at the hands of life and love is its own form of heroism. On “Overdog,” she captures this idea in one of the finest lyrics on the record: “I need you like I need a hole in my head,” Moales sings. “I need a hole in my head/How else could I sing?” Moales comes across as cynical—or even suicidal—before you parse the cleverness of the double-entendre. In Moales’ songs, all it takes is a shift in perspective for a wound to become a channel.
