Many, many records have been swallowed by the narratives attached to their creation, and that attrition rate has hardly lessened with the advent of feverish online news cycles. It’s to Amber Coffman’s immense credit that ‘City of No Reply’, her solo debut, offers less than a noncommittal shrug to the storylines the music press wants it to feed. It’s too thoughtful and poised a collection of pop songs to allow for outside interference once you press play.
For starters, it’s not a record obsessed with specifics. When asked by Pitchfork’s Stacey Anderson if ‘City of No Reply’ is a break up album, Coffman said: “That might be selling it a little short...it’s more of an album about learning to live with yourself.” We have the knowledge that this LP was recorded in the wake of Coffman’s exit from the Dirty Projectors and split with that band’s David Longstreth, who produces here, but its sentiments are universal.
The album’s palette is heavily influenced by R&B and west coast pop, utilising some Bon Iver-esque autotune to rough up some otherwise serene songs.
“There’s a voice inside of me, and it’s time to listen,” she sings on the opener, All to Myself, and it’s a theme revisited regularly and with complete honesty. There are moments of almost overwhelming heartbreak and loneliness on the lyric sheet, but Coffman always leads us into a clearing.
On No Coffee, she makes the line “I haven't been the same since you went away, I have come undone” inviting and breezily melodic. The verse of Nobody Knows, meanwhile, is low lit, alluring and, when you get down to brass tacks, bleak. “I live in a cave, dark and dripping decay, far from the light of day,” Coffman sings. “Like a starless night.” The contrast between form and meaning drives home the versatility of the writing and also plays up to one of pop’s most frequently mined subversive streaks.
Coffman is sure-footed across genre divides, with her vocals moving easily from the demands of the title track’s horn-driven chorus to the layered harmonies of the sparse, dreamlike Do You Believe. ‘City of No Reply’ sets a high watermark for her future solo work and also posits the idea that these songs will comfortably outlive any headlines.
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