Cassandra Jenkins
My Light, My Destroyer
DEAD OCEANS
In 2021, Cassandra Jenkins dropped her “intended swan song” and accidental breakout album, An Overview on Phenomenal Nature. Her new follow up, My Light, My Destroyer, sounds like a more reserved and expected next step that sees the Brooklyn-based songwriter again fusing her wry wit with indie rock and new age-y sounds—along with ambient field recordings, jazz, and other sonic ephemera—to create a moody work reflecting on the ever-expanding cosmos. And the imprisoned eyes of Petco lizards.
For the new album, Jenkins enlisted producers Andrew Lappin and Stephanie Marziano along with a murderers’ row of indie talent including Palehound’s El Kempner, Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy, and former Strange Ranger band leader Isaac Eiger. All of these inputs over a year of recording could’ve been unwieldy, but Jenkins and Lappin keep the pacing of the record breezy even with all the shifting styles. Whereas An Overview largely fell under the shadow of the passing of Jenkins’ friend David Berman, My Light, My Destroyer is more variegated for its subject matter and overall mood. New age dapples the poppy “Delphinium Blue” and guitar crunches throughout “Petco.” On the latter track, Jenkins sings about “two doves wrapped up in filthy and true love” and juxtaposes that sort of free love in nature against the vacant and “sideways gaze of a lizard” trapped in her local pet store.
Found sounds are everywhere on this record, much as they appeared on Jenkins’ previous albums. Scattered like easter eggs throughout the 12 tracks are visceral audio snippets of trains, nature, flight attendants, city life, and a particularly illuminating nighttime chat with her mother as they stargaze on “Betelgeuse.” Jenkins strives to share her mother’s sense of curiosity rather than feeling trapped like that aforementioned Petco prisoner. The music on this track is observational as we listen to her mother’s words: “I just read that there was an asteroid the size of a skyscraper that on Saturday night went between the moon and the Earth,” she says while gazing up at the moon through binoculars. “Did we see it?” her daughter asks. The ominous reply: “Somebody did.”
Themes of heartbreak both celestial and terrestrial dot the tattered landscape of My Light, My Destroyer. From “Tape and Tissue” to the final sophisti-pop track “Only One,” Jenkins is charting a comet-tail-like relationship in freefall as it burns up in an atmosphere of passive aggressiveness, intense emotions, and regret. The color blue and its depressive qualities is a theme running through the reflective tour song “Aurora, IL” and florist job diary “Delphinium Blue.” Piano and saxophone are welcome companions on this journey, yet Jenkins can’t escape that color. On her last album, she talked about someone telling her to go to the ocean, and now she’s staring up at the sky as the blue turns black.
An Overview on Phenomenal Nature was a lovely accident, but My Light, My Destroyer is a sure sidestep with quirky and lingering qualities.
