Album Review: 'I Can't Let Go' - Suki Waterhouse
At times, the album can feel adrift in its sea of simmering indie cool. But with its vivid storytelling and vintage feel, I Can’t Let Go proves Waterhouse to be a formidable talent in her own right.
It’d be easy to write off Suki Waterhouse as just another Lana Del Rey.
Both communicate in smoky, lingering torch songs. They dedicate their disaffected odes to cruel but charismatic lovers. They also revel in Hollywood absurdities but manage to make them feel strangely relatable. And like Del Rey, Waterhouse has that swinging retro vibe – no wonder she was offered a role in the TV adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six.
But Waterhouse is no sad girl.
On her debut album, I Can’t Let Go (released via Sub Pop), the British singer/actress turns her lovelorn vignettes into something truly cathartic, luxuriating in heartbreak rather than letting it consume her.
‘I’m tired of keeping all my feelings to myself,’ she sighs on the brittle beauty of ‘Put Me Through It,’ reflecting on the highs and lows of an all-consuming romance. She ‘Moves’ in mysterious ways though a sluggish dream pop haze filled with longing and regret, recalling the night Jack White told Waterhouse she looked like Suzi Quatro. In the midst of a ‘Melrose Meltdown,’ she’s crying on top of an ex’s ‘milk white sheets,’ ‘hoping one day we’re married/In a house you’ll build around me,’ channelling Chemtrails-era Lana with its hazy, cinematic swells and dreams of domestic bliss.
She’s okay with a little history repeating on ‘Devil I Know,’ pleading ‘Tell me I’m the one you can’t forget.’ ‘On Your Thumb’ is drowsy late-night regret, that moment in the back of the cab after the party when your eyeliner is smudged and there’s a lump in your throat, fighting the urge to revisit the past (‘But I didn’t wanna see you/Requite the feelings just for myself, I guess’). ‘Wild Side’ is also a breathless psych-rock enigma as Waterhouse feels a lover slipping from her fingers. ‘The chapter’s close, but not the door,’ she notes, ‘I know you’re thinking of somebody else.’
Waterhouse’s California dreaming is most evident on the sun-kissed gem, ‘Bullshit on the Internet,’ the most upbeat and most self-aware track on the record as the singer scrolls through the Daily Mail website (probably) and sees pics of a famous ex with his new girlfriend, questioning the validity of their relationship (‘If I read between the lines right, you’re mine/It looks like you love her online’).
‘Blessed,’ however, ends the record on a more hopeful note.
‘I wasted time on all the little things,’ Waterhouse admits, ’Then shed a tear so I could grow some wings,’ blessing the child within that still needs mothering and the father that told her she could be something, before serenely fading into the static. Though not totally untangling herself from her personal and romantic crises, it provides Waterhouse with some semblance of closure as she transitions into her thirties, weary but with a newfound resilience.
‘Jumping into those anxieties helped me feel free,’ Waterhouse recently stated in an interview with NME. ‘That’s not to say suddenly everything became super joyous and easy, but I think if you want to stay in that state of creativity, the whole thing is, a lot of the time, it’s not a great place to be at all. That’s what has to be appreciated – the pockets of bliss are small and it’s the muddiness in between and the willpower to jump into the fear [that lead you to them].’
She embodies this attitude well on I Can’t Let Go. With help from ‘indie’s secret weapon,’ producer Brad Cook, Waterhouse paints these anxieties and insecurities in such blissful, languorous strokes, with songs restlessly unfurling like a dusky fever dream. Influences like Del Rey and Mazzy Star are obvious, but there are also hints of Fiona Apple, 60s girl pop and even classic rock and country.
At times, the album can feel adrift in its sea of simmering indie cool. But with its vivid storytelling and vintage feel, I Can’t Let Go proves Waterhouse to be a formidable talent in her own right.