"I've got these terrible hands." These are the first words Brigitte Naggar sings, repeated with self-conscious yet emphatic emphasis, on Anything glass, her third studio album as Common Holly. I know the feeling — I have the magical combination of Raynaud's disease and recently out-of-remission carpal tunnel syndrome.
Yet I've long been aesthetically fixated on hands. For whatever reason, I've always loved any artwork that was even mildly reminiscent of The Creation of Adam, and have understood that it is these terrible hands through which I have the dangerous ability to create something from nothing. Naggar seems acutely aware of this, too: "Anything glass will contain us, and anything glass will break," she said of the record in a statement, framing the collection as a celebration of fragility and beauty, and their inherent interconnectedness.
This is the ever-fleeting world in which a Common Holly song is plucked from obscurity. Here, the singer-songwriter infuses her signature stately ballads with denser instrumentation and jazz-inspired flourishes ("Enough," "It's true we've been happier") — as well as a glowering crescendo on "Right in between the lines, I" that gets abruptly swallowed by feedback — to underscore that capturing ephemera is her perennial pursuit, deftly shaping and reshaping crystallization.