Partner by Caley Conway
There's much going on with Milwaukee's Caley Conway on her third full album, Partner. Narrative points of view can switch from the workaday present to futures both fantastical and plainly facing morality. The 10 songs Conway has written and collected here are an invitation into the works of a brilliantly scattered mind which eventually finds serenity amid resignation. She's unafraid to swipe an entire line outright from a Beatles song (from "Help!").
Sonically, however, she's her own person. Though Conway has in the past revealed affinity with Joni Mitchell by remaking songs of hers, she blazes her own distinctive path. Though Partner's catchiest tracks would be welcome on today's alt rock and adult alt radio, there's a sensibility about the album—and the singles and EPs she has released between this project and 2019’s Surrounded Middle—that suggest a hypothetical 1980s wherein Laurie Anderson tried harder to make actual pop music—with Kate Bush and Talking Heads somehow along for the ride.
Quirky, but not for merely quirk's sake, Conway offers a humane, sensuous adjacent reality within Partner's grooves and lyrics as often earthbound as they are surreally flighty. This doppelganger for a young Shelly Duvall has as much right as anyone to be the city's next ac to break out to a much wider audience.
Caley Conway plays a free show at Crafty Cow-Bayview Thursday, Oct. 9 at 6:30 p.m.
