Some artists regard light and dark as opposing forces to be reconciled. The better ones know they were never separate to begin with. Amelia Baker, the multi-instrumentalist behind Cinder Well, is one of the latter. There’s no lament in her music and no plea for darkness to lift. Acceptance is not the soft option that it’s often mistaken for. It can be the harder path, and it’s the one she keeps choosing to tread on. A Blooming Body, her fifth record, pushes further into that difficulty. It offers no resolution, only the discipline of sitting with what is.
I’ve been waking up with “how do we know when it’s finished”, the refrain from ‘While the Womb Screams Silently’, almost every morning since sitting with this album. Yes, it’s musically infectious, but it’s also the question that’s been plaguing my existence, and there’s a relief in hearing someone else put it into song. Over what sounds like a sparse arrangement, a handful of questions unspool in under five minutes: internal longing, patriarchal ideals, the constant struggle for self-definition while inhabiting borrowed identities–when does healing end? There may never be completion. Piano, viola, French horn, they coalesce as if to shape this. Our work is never over.
Baker plays seven instruments on this record, though there’s never any fight for space. Nothing reaches for attention, least of all the opening track, which builds gradually, piano keys intertwining with her vocals that crackle gently during one small moment. This tells you everything you need to know about how honest and vulnerable A Blooming Body intends to be.
Eleven musicians join in on this record. By rights, it should sound grandiose, but it barely raises its voice. What it sounds like instead is goosebump territory, the kind of music that ends up vibrating in your bones. Baker has built A Blooming Body the way nature builds anything worth looking at twice. Walk past a fallen branch and you’ll notice nothing. Look properly and there’s a whole civilisation going on in there, organisms thriving in the bark, on top of a mycelium network doing its invisible work underground. That’s the level of care at play here, minute and largely unseen, which is exactly why the album functions as well left on in the background, occupying space in life, as it does taken apart and lived inside.
‘Ashes’ is where that care gets most domestic, built from lines almost too banal to be lyrics at all, coffee and birds in the morning, windows washed clean over a weekend, and there’s no reason detail this ordinary should be moving; it manages it anyway, with a flugelhorn drifting through that leans doom-like but doesn’t commit to the genre. ‘Signals’ takes that intimacy and strips it back further still, restraint as the whole strategy, which is what makes the song feel like a universe one’s been temporarily allowed to observe; fingers sliding audibly on strings and a double bass gives it both warmth and a sense of foreboding.
A Blooming Body doesn’t resolve the way one would expect it to, and the payoff rarely arrives as crescendo. It accumulates instead, small phrases stacking until you notice the ground has shifted beneath, the melodies hang, modal and patient, circling a feeling until it becomes familiar and the hurt subsides.
I’ve now spent a couple of weeks trying to write my way around this album, looking for the perfect words, and a sentence to finally pin it down. I’ve learned to accept that perhaps they don’t exist. No amount of talking about it will do it justice. Only living with it, waking up preprogrammed to its refrains, catching yourself humming rhetorical questions. Baker is offering company in not knowing, and the record asks that one sits inside that the same way she does. There may never be completion. At least we have this.
