It is a cliché to say that bedroom pop artists must entirely mature out of this phase, lighten their touch and step into somewhere more muted and adult beyond their four walls. Since her homemade 2017 hit ‘Pretty Girl’, American singer-songwriter Claire Cottrill’s slyly vulnerable lyrics have always fixated on an uncomfortable desire to charm. On her third album ‘Charm,’ that desperate need to be ‘Sexy to Someone,’ the refrain of the album’s leading single, continues to permeate a palatable surface with irony.
The warm lull of these soundscapes is inviting yet inconclusive. This is the dichotomy of charm, as Cottrill defines it, between the “fleeting moments of being seen” and the “not knowing how long it will last,” and the album forbids the listener from giving into this transitory bliss for too long. As the first song explains, she is a ‘Nomad’ navigating these emotional shifts, and the whispered readiness to “run the risk of losing everything” in the first line prevents any single emotion from hanging too heavy.
The youthful chimes of Cottrill’s earlier work are here enveloped in autumnal 1970s-style production, contextualising that stark homemade sound within a nostalgic familiarity. Flourishes of archaic instruments such as the mellotron and the Wurlitzer add a kitsch, performative layer, especially in the perfumed lilt of ‘Second Nature’, where sampled laughter and humming build a hazy vignette of carefree joy. A sudden jolt into waltz time catches the listener off-guard, while her lyrics allude to a fear of being found out, tempering the song’s simple charm with an air of uncertainty and impermanence.
Her feathery voice circles the same shadowy, private motivations, with romance reduced to “a reason to get out of the house,” and the shifts between continuous, pulsing grooves speaking for her uniform vocals. Against Cottrill’s resolutely polite delivery, the instrumentals pull tricks so that the edge of discomfort is always in the peripheral vision, but a little too visible and predictable after a certain point. Nonetheless, ‘Charm’ lingers and switches eerily, allowing pockets of addictive yearning to incapacitate the listener while hypnotically demonstrating the ephemeral nature of these feelings. It is this tactility that pulls the listener out of her earlier, more static work and shows them every shade of her lyrical intention.
