In the last several months, for wearily obvious reasons, subgenres like “bedroom pop” (as in pop music you can record in your bedroom, with a minimum of equipment) have blared louder amid isolation. Charli XCX’s 2020 LP How I’m Feeling Now was a prime example of this, and Buzzy Lee’s first full-length, Spoiled Love, seems like another.
Yet Lee, who is actually Steven Spielberg’s daughter Sasha, traveled from California to Italy while creating and recording these songs, and her isolation was creative rather than medical, enforced by heartbreak rather than by viral outbreak. She’s not alone, however: regular collaborator and producer Nicholas Jaar helps Lee simulate a darkened bedroom in which every instrument, particularly the piano, sounds as if it’s trying to push into a corner that’s a safe distance from everything else.
Electronic textures push the notes and rhythms back together to huddle near Lee’s voice, a warm and earthy thing that also floats coolly and ethereally, in the mode of indie-pop vocalists from Lori Carson and St. Vincent to Zooey Deschanel. When Lee closes her mouth and lets the aforementioned piano carry “Brie,” or waits out the sad synths of “Mendonoma,” her held breath can almost be sensed. When she sings again, she graces the spare waltz of “Rules” with the melancholy of her mistakes and adds a softly judging femininity to “What Has a Man Done,” her version of Drake’s unhappier reflections.
The music coalesces while Lee deals with the dissipation of love, and so the last two tracks of Spoiled Love come across as its most complete: “High on You” is yearning electro with half-submerged beats, while “All the While” makes “a nod to reality,” as the refrain has it, and to her downcast feelings. Buzzy Lee gets to cry, then to dance, and then to rest.
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