The follow-up to confessional songwriter Mary Lamberts Top 30-charting full-length debut, Heart on My Sleeve, Grief Creature was five years in the making. Reportedly having undergone many versions -- track selections, song revisions, title changes, shifting release dates -- what emerged is an over hour-long, distinctly personal collection of songs, poems, and musical narratives addressing experiences with sexual assault and various forms of discrimination. Written, produced, and arranged almost entirely by Lambert, she has referred to it as a breakup album to shame. In the process of working through some heavy trauma and emotional baggage to get to the breakup part, she includes heart-rending adult-pop songs like Born Sad and Easy to Leave as well as intense spoken-word tracks (Another Rape Poem) and slicker collaborations with Macklemore and Hollis that dont deviate from the albums vision. It opens with gentle piano and hushed vocals on the brief Fine/Finally, which has Lambert responding to her own reflection with: Shit, she looks happy for a girl who is drowning. The poignant pop of second track Shame sets the tone for much of the album, whose wistful songs remember abusers, abandoners, and comforters alike. Following Lamberts appearance in 2012 on the Macklemore & Ryan Lewis hit Same Love, Macklemore is featured here on House of Mirrors, a brighter, still piano-based entry that finds empowerment in the realization that Its me against me. But its Lamberts poetry that makes for the most affecting and candid moments on the album. Accompanied by yearning strings, Me, Museum uses the metaphor of a rabid dog in place of an abusive partner of her mothers (But the dog didnt want kids/The dog would scream it in the hallway at four A.M.). Other such pieces include Trauma Is a Stalker and Knife, which is partly sung. There are less memorable tracks here that land somewhere between poem and song and seem to serve as vehicles for narratives rather than fully developed songs. In contrast, tuneful highlights include Not Ready to Die Yet, which offers one of the albums strongest vocal performances, and at over seven minutes long, the moving closer Bless This Hell features Julien Baker, an indie artist widely noted for her own vulnerable demeanor. Despite its often devastating lyrics and occasional dramatic turns, Grief Creature is an accessible album with a pop-friendly veneer, if its 17 tracks play out like a work for theater as much as a pop album. Its one, it feels, she very much needed to make. ~ Marcy Donelson

Rovi