Review: Whitney Ballen – ‘Being Here is Hard’
Between Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked at Me and Whitney Ballen’s new EP, Being Here is Hard (April 7th, 2017), there seems to be something about Anacortes, WA that is bringing out stripped down, haunting, and beautiful pieces from the musicians there. Being Here is Hard is extremely minimalistic, with five songs featuring mostly guitar and a single vocal line, but the result is captivating. Most of the credit for this has to go to Ballen’s ghostly vocal performance: she sings in a quiet, breathy voice that sounds like a mix of Joanna Newsom, Fever Ray, and Bjork, and is able to perfectly reflect the subtle turns of drama that permeate the lyrics.
The EP opens on the song “Give Up,” with a dreamy, Beach House-sounding guitar line which Ballen whispers over in a secretive, defeated fashion, ‘I give up, I can’t compete with her anymore.’ It goes on to narrate her growing resignation in the face of a love interest who seems to have moved on, but opens up with the last line where she reminds them that all their problems will continue to exist, even once she’s gone. This song greatly illustrates one of Ballen’s greatest strengths throughout the EP, her ability to use repetition and little slices of new information to create whole stories with only a few lines. In “Nauseous,” she spends the first half of the song singing about how she has been feeling nauseous day in and day out, no matter what she tries to do. Then, the music changes slightly and the line ‘I know you fucked someone else,’ comes out, which immediately changes the paradigm and opens the song to new levels of depth.
I could spend the entire review reciting favorite lines (‘I know you wanted to die/Because we all want to die/With someone’ from “Yellow Lake” is another beauty) but the music deserves recognition as well. The choice to be so extremely simple is a risky one, but the music impeccably paired with the lyrics and more instrumentation or complexity would only get in the way of the out-of-time floating atmosphere the EP creates. Engineer and mixer Nicholas Wilbur also does a wonderful job of mixing the few elements together in a way that feels distant and dreamlike but never feels empty.
With so few songs, and with such sparse composition, it is amazing how much Whitney Ballen is able to fit in. It is a folk-EP that seems to have made its way here from the afterlife, and it is the perfect music to put on when you want to join someone else who knows what it feels like to detach and ponder the heaviness being here in this world.
(Listen to Being Here is Hard below via Bandcamp and you can get more info about Whitney Ballen on Facebook HERE.)