Nothing's About to Happen to Me

Mitskis eighth studio album picks up where The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We left off, at least insofar as that it employs both a live band and an orchestra and revisits that albums juxtaposition of misty country and jagged indie rock. Where it differs is in its framing as a concept album about a woman whose internal catastrophizing further complicates her struggles with both home life and fitting in outside. Titled Nothings About to Happen to Me, it opens with "In a Lake," which begins as a light country ballad about not wanting to live in a small town ("Where you never get away from your first love/Its like one brand of soaps sold in town"). As she goes on to consider living in a lake ("The sky before you/The dark right behind") and then a big city ("The lights all around you/The dark safe inside"), she adds chaotic rock and orchestral accompaniment as well as street recordings to the mix, cranking up the volume and the anxiety in the process of a making her decision. The next song, "Wheres My Phone," is a fuzzy, squealing indie rock jam in which she longs to have nothing on her mind, and "Cats" returns to airy country balladry for a song that anticipates being abandoned ("Our two cats making sure Ill be alright"). She next performs the thought exercise "If I Leave" ("Somebody else will find you/But nobody else could see me quite as clearly as you"), a melancholy rock song that leads to her wondering if her partner would rather she were dead on the twangy, hushed orchestral entry "Dead Women." And were not even through all of side A. Mitski goes on to bargain (the lightly orchestrated, jazzy piano-bar outing "Ill Change for You"), walk on eggshells for her lover (the jaunty yet hypervigilant "Rules), and get even more paranoid and self-protective (the agitated, surf rock-injected "That White Cat"). By the time we reach the end of the albums 11 tracks, as reflective rocker "Lightning" opens with the words "Lightning hit so close/Sounded like a big tin can/All hail the rain/Running like ghosts on the roof," its become clear that things are worse in her head even if threats abound. Full of dark, dark humor and produced by her longtime collaborator Patrick Hyland, Nothings About to Happen to Me may be the Mitski-est Mitski album yet, despite its character-driven nature and partly because, at least on some level, it captures the anxiety of the Zeitgeist of its time. ~ Marcy Donelson