Springtime Carnivore
Midnight Room
AUTUMN TONE
7/10
Greta Morgan is a token of versatility in pop music. Before releasing Midnight Room, her second full-length album under the moniker Springtime Carnivore, she collaborated with Katy Goodman (of La Sera and Vivian Girls) on Take It, It’s Yours, an album of classic punk covers stripped down to their barebones blues-folk hooks that replaces shouts with vulnerable croons. Midnight Room follows suit in its straightforward and sparse R&B/synthetic piano-singer tracks like “Rough Magic” and “Double Infinity,” and it allows Goodman to sneak in sadness in the guise of bubbling pop on “Face In the Moon” and “Raised By Wolves.”
Midnight Room chronicles the events around a tumultuous relationship and its subsequent end, but to call the album Springtime Carnivore’s “breakup record” would be to do it a disservice. Much in the way that Annie Hall isn’t a “breakup film,” A Doll’s House isn’t “breakup theatre,” and Drown isn’t “breakup literature,” the fraught loneliness of the end of a relationship is present on Midnight Room, but it’s fodder for a much wider range of experience. Here, Springtime Carnivore invites the listener into a lush and terrible world, full of all the confusion, skepticism, euphoria, and yes, loneliness that make up our own complex and contradictory experiences.
On “Nude Polaroids,” Morgan’s clear blue and solitary voice sounds over a muted guitar and glistening piano melody: “You can keep the polaroids / Where I am posing nude / Even though I’m leavin’ / I still trust in you,” she sings. The relationship, however tragic, is secondary, and we’re left with a narrator in Morgan who isn’t bitter or wallowing, just completely honest with herself when she declares that “The good love will come / But tonight’s going to be the worst.”
