There are lots of doors to pass through on the way to understanding why loneliness or love are such all-consuming emotions. Perhaps it’s because, conceptually, they’re both so ambiguous when it comes to the “why.” Who can really say why you love a person? How you love them, on the other hand, is much simpler. The former involves articulation of something great and intangible, while the latter simply asks that you’re awake long enough to feel what’s going on. Regardless, the answers to both often involve transporting yourself to a place from which you feel like you can see your life from the outside, the ideal form of a feeling. That act of gaining insight by observing yourself from the outside in is how Scandinavian folk duo My Bubba hit their mark on their newest album Big Bad Good.
Big Bad Good leaves listeners feeling like they’re processing a lot emotionally, but the boney arrangements of the songs give you the impression that the motivation for doing so is almost being extracted from nothingness. That’s not a dig, either. Musically, My Bubba forges their own specific and extremely sparse path while forgoing the dreariness that unfocused minimalism facilitates. Everything the duo builds up, they do so subtly and with purpose. The electric piano on “ET” pulsates while glueing together the song’s whirring and almost improvisational layers. Soulfully letting out the words “I feel like ET yearning, burning up from within,” the song is evocative of wanting to close the distance between you and your core essence.
Live, My Larsdotter and Guðbjörg Tómasdóttir (Bubba) squeeze eyes shut, opening their lips just enough to push out powerfully faint harmonies seamlessly nestled in between breaths; like they’re not even speaking so much as channeling. Maybe it’s just the phrase, but with only a handful of words in tow, the song “Ghost Sweat” maintains a strikingly visual property. In the wake of soberingly exclaiming “I’m tired” Tómasdóttir let’s out a contemplative exhale before the duo’s voices at times indistinguishable from each other whisper “The ghosts have left my body/ I’m free to live again” and somehow you’re reminded of the labor implicit in coping; a theme that pops up often.
Coping is a link to the past. It seems like the right word to use considering aspects of the record feel so historical; like looking through a box a trinkets left to you by some deceased great-grandparent who braved the Oregon trail. “Letters,” the daunting ode to a deceased partner, finds a narrator meditating on her isolation trying to ponder what it is to live after the death of her husband. “The letters are in the mailbox/ I’m filing for divorce from my late husband,” by end of the song has turned into “ I must divorce my late husband/ Cause he is not around to bark at the door”. The narrator recalls the commotion surrounding his death. Everyone loved him, not as much as her, but he “died into his grave” anyway.
As much as the record explores attachment or longing, at times it expresses what it is to value freedom, or at least a more flexible evaluation of the future. No more than on the sweet and almost danceable ballad “Charm.” The Simon and Garfunkel-esque guitars weave in and out of each other as Larsdotter and Tómasdóttir sing, “A woman needs to feel precious,” followed by “All I’m promising you is my charm, and that I can’t do you much harm,”. The song on one level is saying I’m not offering you the world, but I’m not really asking much of you either, and that’s more candor than you’ll usually be able to draw from any song that sounds this sweet, ever. Conversely, as a motif, it hilariously holds a mirror to the “Sometimes I’m mean/ but I never mean to let you down,” on the song “Carolina.”
At it’s heart, Big Bad Good is an album about closing gaps. Closing gaps between you and your family, another person, or a choice lifestyle. Not always trying to give you a read on much in the way of specifics, My Bubba often forces you to project some of your own ideas and images onto what’s being said. For all that freedom though, you still feel like you’re whispering into the business end of a tin can phone, harkening back to the simplicity of feeling up against the amorphous and intangible difficulty of discerning why you feel.