Jennifer Castle's latest album requires a bit of patience. Not because it's difficult or dull, but because it's sometimes best to meet a piece of art halfway, to try and bring to it what it brings to you.
Camelot is ripe with patience. Patience for oneself, patience for those around you, patience for all the impatience that sets our fingers tapping and our mood on edge.
That sense of settled ease hasn't dulled Castle's blade-like eye or corrupted her imagination; rather it's allowed her to find the fantastical around every corner, her eye traveling past the veil, thinner every day.
The domestic, country-pop warmth of the music — wooly piano and keyboards, sugary strings, rubber band guitars and jaunty horns swing across Camelot — belies the kaleidoscopic wit and fantasy of Castle's words, spinning the humming din of middle-age, of climate anxiety, of God and friendship and the chattering stars, into a lush Looney Tunes wonder.
"I've been sleeping in the unfinished basement," Castle sings at the album's outset, and what could be an admission of failure or gentle depression becomes something else. In Castle's world, that unfinished basement is just awaiting completion; when she slips into dream, it becomes a universe of possibility. Bittersweet, yes, but hopeless? Never.