Familiar (LP)

Description

Familiar. Usually reserved for things we think we know. A face, a place, a feeling, a record perhaps. Until, of course, they aren’t quite the same anymore. Or maybe you aren’t. Jennifer’s debut album lives somewhere around there. It’s a record about time, which is already a fairly ambitious subject considering nobody seems to have figured that one out yet. More specifically, it’s about what time does to a person. The old versions, the new versions, and all the ones in between that you only notice when something suddenly brings them back. Someone you haven’t seen in years. A room you used to know. A certain way the light falls. That sort of thing. There’s a bit of a doppelgänger situation going on, too. Finding something completely new and somehow recognising it. Meeting yourself again without immediately realising who you’re talking to. Which can be nice. Or strange. Usually both. The songs on Familiar sit comfortably with that contradiction. Looking backwards without wanting to go back. Missing things without necessarily wanting them returned. Realising that people who once occupied most of your waking hours can become people whose address you don’t know. Meanwhile, some tiny, seemingly irrelevant detail from fifteen years ago remains perfectly intact. Memory has its own filing system. Not a particularly sensible one. Jennifer wrote a series of poems alongside the album. In them, familiarity appears in melting snow, rough coastlines, a kitchen already warm in the morning, somebody’s hands fitting into yours. Elsewhere she wonders about someone she once knew everything about and now knows nothing about. They could live around the corner. They could live on another continent. They could, technically, be dead. Probably not. But that’s time for you. Maybe Familiar is less about remembering who you were than realising you never entirely stopped being them. Things get added. Things disappear. Things come back looking slightly different. And somehow, you recognise them.