Capturing the laws – or, better yet, lawlessness – of attraction can be a doozy; to some, it’s a White Whale perpetually out of reach. The clumsiness of words can either break or enhance the spell, depending on how or when something is being said. What a maddening prospect. And to attempt to capture this jittery tension within the brevity of a pop song? Wooh, boy. That, true believers, takes a deft hand.
Turns out Claire Cottrill – better known as Clairo – is remarkably good at this, as she proves yet again with her third long player Charm. But before we pull the threads on the who’s, what’s and why’s, it seems important to point out that Cottrill’s development as a pop star has been the peculiar antithesis of the usual trajectory of peers breaking the mainstream through viral internet fame.
Since releasing the Rostam-produced debut album Immunity, Cottrill seems wholly, well, immune, to playing dress up with each new recording project. Over the past half-decade, Clairo has kept the listener closely in the loop of her own stirring coming-of-age growing pains with a rare poise. And this liking for closeness can be distilled right down to the way she sings: a plainspoken, diaphanous coo that forces you to lean in closer to what’s being said. In some ways, this style can spark accusations of sounding like a demure ingenue. But in Clairo’s hands, it’s a potent smokescreen for powerful affirmations – affirmations that never force themselves onto you as such.
Cottrill’s music is incredibly easy on the ears; songs often breeze by like a feathers carried by gusts of wind. But even in visiting the most familiar and comforting of places, if you look long and hard enough, you will sooner or later discover details that reveal something novel. Clairo seems to carry herself with that same disposition album after album: putting one foot in front of the other, wholly unbothered with mapping out a road too far ahead, so that the minutiae of the scenery can be fully absorbed into the songwriting. This allows her to articulate unspoken sentiments with singular clarity: on each record, a new revelation seems to hit her on the nose.
Immunity became a pure-hearted pop album that could’ve only been bred into existence during the information age – a tug-of-war where the gravitational pull of maturation is stronger than ever, inside an arena where dizzy spells of womanhood and sexuality still hold home court advantage. “Outside is getting colder / Why does it feel like I’m older than I asked to be?” Cottrill wonders among “Sinking”‘s tender and crisp bedroom R&B backdrop. “But when you say my name / It all falls away so tenderly”. In hindsight “Sinking” sounds like an embryonic harbinger to the more soul-inflected direction of Charm, albeit without the mileage and markings of lived experience as emotional heft.
2021’s quietly devastating, Jack Antonoff-produced Sling reckons with said lived experience, cocooning her anxieties and depression within its palliative 70s soft rock stylings. “Blouse” wouldn’t be as intrusive a testimonial of the toxic male gaze without Cottrill’s mastery of restraint. The way she delivers the main hook for the magnetic “Amoeba” – “I show up to the party just to leave” – like some throwaway line deserves to be studied in an essay much longer than this review – how it captures her fatigue and fed-up-ness with the world ‘out there’. Yet she still has the audacity to stumble into a jam that sounds like a subconscious nod to Stevie Wonder’s “Another Star” – a song that dresses up heartbreak into a sultry latin-infused cadence. But in “Amoeba”, the backdrop isn’t a sorrowful hangover in the boiling heat of Playa Valadero, but a grey-skied drizzly morning in a remote woodland cabin.
Charm isn’t a bold stylistic left turn, but more like a steadying of the course. Cabin fever has set in, and Cottrill is giving her young life among the living – the takin’ time to make time – another tentative go. The pedal steel driven opener “Nomad” explores the grey areas of desire with heavy eyes: “I’m cynical, a mess / I’m touch starved and shameless”, Cottrill muses, olive-branching two conflicting thoughts under an arrangement that’s not quite blog-era indie folk strummer and not quite strip-strutting blue-eyed soul. With producer and Dap King Leon Michels at the helm, at first listen, Charm‘s grooves aren’t the metronome to wanton liberation, but a warm hand pulling the protagonist out of prolonged inertia.
On the immediately winsome, spry “Sexy To Someone”, Cottrill – an artist whose work has been described oftentimes as “introspective” and “diaristic” – might be her first evergreen moment. It touches on a universal need to be seen, even in the simplest of gestures: an alluring look, a warm smile or a compliment can sometimes be enough of a boost to endure the toils of the day. Cottrill also slips in her most risqué lyric so far: “Sexy to something / I see in everything / Honey stickin’ to your hands, sugar on the rim / Nothing more, nothing less of thought / Take it all to heart.” The fluttery flute flourish seems to whisper her sentiments like a naughty devil on resting her shoulder. The piano and the drums seem to work in unison to snap Cottrill out of her woozy daydream, jerking into the chorus like a pole vaulter in full stride.
Charm lives up to its title – not with slick, rehearsed pickup lines – but a joyous, unguarded ‘Oh god, I can’t believe I just caught myself thinking this’-type of sincerity. Clairo tiptoes around commonplace expressions of love to unearth often unspoken gestures simmering underneath. The odd awkward silence that her younger self might have broken with a floundering admission can finally have its day within the liminal space of Charm‘s featherweight neo-soul apparitions.
On the cinematic soul-funk stunner “Juna” she sings about a crush that makes her want to buy a new dress, and concurrently slip off that same dress, which makes it quite possibly the most romantic lyric written in the year 2024. Improvised instrumentation – piano, Wurlitzer, saxophone – enshrine her supple vocals in a devotional way, like sprinklings of confetti. It’s one of the more effective ways to confess love without using the word love.
Some say foreplay and innuendo are usually better than whatever follows, and on Charm, this certainly holds true. “Glory of the Snow” (which sounds conspicuously similar to “Seabird” by Alessi Brothers) is named after a blue flower species resilient enough to grow through the snow during even the harshest winters – she seems to acknowledge this elusive nature as well: “I can feel there’s something in the between”. The switch-the-channel transition to the lo-fi downtempo “Pier 4” is smoother than it has any intention to be. It acts more like an interlude to “Glory of the Snow”, as Clairo herself seems to be at a loss of the treacherous push-and-pull of desire; “Where’s your line, when do you draw? / When close is not close enough?” she asks.
Clairo never lets the question spiral into something more downcast or gloomy; instead lingering in the sheer bewilderment of it – as she peers into a horizon of possibilities where ocean and sky blend into each other like perfect bedfellows. It’s okay that reality – more often than not – doesn’t live up to the dream, as long as it encourages us to keep dreaming.
