Review: Turn Out the Lights by Julien Baker

Julien Baker attracts praise from unexpected places. Jack Antonoff, who seems to yearn for any chance to shore up the credibility of female pop stars, directly invited Baker to collaborate a few months back. Earlier this year, DCFC’s Ben Gibbard took the stage with Baker and nodded approvingly as she belted the verses of Photobooth back to him, eyes shut and fists clenched.

Baker has no problem appeasing the critical overlords either. Since her 2015 debut album Sprained Ankle, Julien Baker has thoroughly disarmed reviewers, forcing an unusual mass prostration. “[It] was a bolt of lightning from out of nowhere, zapped down from heaven directly into a bottle bobbing in a vast and lonely ocean…” Ben Salmon from Paste Magazine then remarked on Baker’s debut. “[It] could bring you to your knees,” Ian Cohen from Pitchfork wrote of the same. Perhaps Pitchfork’s vast sea of disdain is not as bottomless as it seems. Or perhaps Baker tricked them all by creating something no one knew how to critique. 

Turn Out the Lights, released just this October, is yet another confounding display of talent. Uncut vulnerability insulates Baker from the typical blowback often reserved for sophomore albums. Baker surges with hope as quickly as she sinks with despair -- oftentimes within one song, and sometimes even in a single line. “Maybe it's all gonna turn out alright / And I know that it's not, but I have to believe that it is,” she rapidly backpedals in “Appointments”, the record’s first single.

An even hollower realization surfaces and vanishes toward the end of “Claws in Your Back”. “I'm better off learning how to be / Living with demons I've mistaken for saints / If you keep it between us, I think they're the same,” Baker wails, suggesting yet again that all metaphors are falsely chosen, designed only to tape people together for as long as they hold.

Baker is a trained guitarist and a powerful vocalist, but her songwriting is peerless. She holds no single flag. Optimism is good, healthy, deluded, and oppressive. People are lovely and brutal. Isolation abounds, whether or not there is a God. She’s certainly not the first to recognize self-deceptions, or worship scars. But of all those scrambling to understand the void, Baker is the only one who rings in your ears long after the lights go off.