Angel

<b>Lizzy McAlpine</b> has never needed a lot to stun listeners, as is apparent on “ceilings”, her breakthrough hit in which she paints a vivid portrait of new love with little more than an acoustic guitar and her hushed voice. She finds poetry in tangled sheets, romance in quiet drives home, and <i>Angel</i>, her fourth studio album, elevates her talent for finding inspiration—and metaphors that level you with their gravity—in the mundane and memorable details, conversations and epiphanies of everyday life, even when they hurt. Take <b>“Ugly things”</b>, a list of the souvenirs—old photos in wallets, sweatshirts on a shelf—of an expired love, or <b>“Peach”</b>, which takes the simple act of slicing stone fruit and spins it into a rumination on independence and embracing solitude. She faces the less-glamorous realities that come with travelling the world for her art alongside Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold on <b>“Soldier of the road”</b> and takes accountability in <b>“Mason’s song”</b>, an endearing apology set to her soft strumming (“I still have things to work on/That will never end/But I can’t do it alone”). Love—and its power to transform, even in absence or under duress—courses throughout <i>Angel</i>, from <b>“The light in the painting”</b> (“You are the light in the painting/That my eye is drawn to first”) to <b>“I have a friend”</b> (“My mouth is just a straight line/Without your lips to kiss it”) and <b>“The crowd”</b>, in which grief sits alongside her on the piano bench in a tear-jerker of a letter to her late father. McAlpine may have expanded her instrumental palette to include more robust arrangements, but <i>Angel</i> reveals, once again, that all she needs is her voice and a guitar, or a piano, to get to the heart of her truth.