'The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We' by Mitski
Although Mitski Miyawaki became a more prominent public figure as her fifth and sixth albums, 2018’s Be the Cowboy and 2022’s Laurel Hell, prodded her into an aural spotlight, she remains at heart and in mind a thoughtful presenter of indie-pop grandiloquence rather than a manufacturer of mainstream-pop overload.
The gap isn’t vast, but it is artistically significant: in the midst of “Bug Like an Angel,” the opening song of The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, Mitski sings “Sometimes a drink feels like family,” and then a chorus suitable for a chapel repeats the final word hugely and beautifully. It’s a wry moment in theory but completely earnest in execution.
Mitski creates many other gorgeous, self-knowing moments across 11 songs. She finds a sad saunter to go with muted piano and pedal steel on “The Frost,” murmurs like a threat inside the midtempo alt-rock stomp of “Buffalo Replaced,” breathes out a kind of crystallizing mist as “When Memories Snow” turns into a flowering of horns and shifts effortlessly from softness to stridency while “Star” expands and then dissipates into the cosmos.
With her regular collaborator Patrick Hyland again in charge of recording, engineering, and producing, Mitski feels quite comfortable with deliberate disarray, pushing a sudden attack of heavy rock drumming into the otherwise dreamy coda of “The Deal,” or letting dogs and crickets bark and chirp during the unsettlingly dramatic end of “I’m Your Man.”
Touches like that bring to mind similarly talented and form-bending singer-songwriters like St. Vincent and Father John Misty, although Mitski’s distant-chanteuse aspect also recalls Sam Phillips. And Mitski, like Phillips, is never as distant as she seems, because her vocal melodicism can’t help but draw her and the listener together. Her grandiloquence is indie and intelligent, yet it’s also just too alluring.
