The album’s quiet hollows give rise to fever pitches of emotional depth. With “You Will Come Dwelling,” Margolin launches into one of the crucial incendiary vocal takes she’s ever captured within the studio. “Come residence and care for the mess I’ve made,” she implores of somebody she addresses, in true Spencer Krug style, solely as “Swallow.” She screams herself ragged because the music gallops to a detailed, her voice burning off all of the varnish that when clung to its floor.
Throughout Clouds, Margolin wrestles with the specter of the particular person she would have to be to glide frictionlessly by the world: an inexhaustible performer, a relaxed and smiling face, an individual with compact and tidy emotions that by no means overwhelm her or anybody else. On “God of Every little thing Else,” she envisions this double as a literal second particular person in one of many album’s most mystifying and highly effective pictures: “Wishing I used to be any person else/Begging you to like me again/I watch the way in which she stands/And the way in which her arms transfer/In a fog of you.” Later within the album, she sings, with barbed irony, as if she’s already remodeled into this sanguine doppelganger. “Nothing makes me unhappy now/Every little thing makes me glad,” she wails on “In a Dream I’m a Portray,” sounding as if she may both begin crying or spitting flames.
Within the embers of all this rage smolders grief: grief for a love that tore itself aside; grief for these goals of success whose realization didn’t in truth result in a cheerful and balanced life; grief for all of the imaginary, idealized folks Margolin might need been however couldn’t grow to be. “The laborious bits of my coronary heart, they fall into the opening and so they tear it aside,” she sings on “A Gap within the Floor.” She refuses placid decision, refuses to fold her ache neatly away. Hers is a world-making torment: It shatters the actual and calls for its wayward shards forge themselves into previously unimaginable shapes.
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