Clarity. That's the sheen-smeared word that first comes to mind when I think of Gatlin, a singer-songwriter who is actually from Orlando, FL, ("Who the fuck moves to Florida?" she wonders on "Really Funny") but is currently based out of Los Angeles.
I think there are songs that came out — or found us for the first time — amid the tumult of 2020 that have etched out a particularly deep groove in our memories, and "Talking to Myself" from Gatlin's 2020 EP, Sugarcoated, is one of those for me. It was a relentlessly catchy, comforting soundtrack to pacing a room and doing exactly that, up-shored by all the uncertainty of everything.
Clarity can mean a lot of different things, and it's not exactly a novel sound in pop music. Like we do with "angular" for art rock, we insist on putting a quarter in the jar (and immediately Googling a synonym) when we use "crystalline" in a pop review. But as much as glassy synths and vocal production are everywhere, rarely are they so well paired with a lucidity of expression — even when the narrative progression messily avoids easy conclusions the way life so often seems to go.
Lurching lead single "When You're Breaking My Heart" sums up the mess Gatlin finds herself in on I Sleep Fine Now, realizing that she actually liked someone better when they weren't into her over a propulsive drum pattern. Her oblong voice is a resonant, all-encompassing conduit for every conflicting, illogical feeling you've ever had, and her storytelling ability gives the grand "pop's Lucinda Williams" declaration in her press notes legs.
"Don't wanna know that you switched shampoos / But you're sitting so close, and my nose works," dropped in the first verse of the wistful "Paris," is a prime example of the dry humour Gatlin bakes into her matter-of-fact admissions while she waxes lyrical about heartbreak and loneliness, the primary subject matter of I Sleep Fine Now. Often, in my experience anyway, that and clarity tend to go hand-in-hand. I kind of think closure is a myth, but the singer-songwriter seems to have found hers — or at least something close to it — here.
(Independent)I think there are songs that came out — or found us for the first time — amid the tumult of 2020 that have etched out a particularly deep groove in our memories, and "Talking to Myself" from Gatlin's 2020 EP, Sugarcoated, is one of those for me. It was a relentlessly catchy, comforting soundtrack to pacing a room and doing exactly that, up-shored by all the uncertainty of everything.
Clarity can mean a lot of different things, and it's not exactly a novel sound in pop music. Like we do with "angular" for art rock, we insist on putting a quarter in the jar (and immediately Googling a synonym) when we use "crystalline" in a pop review. But as much as glassy synths and vocal production are everywhere, rarely are they so well paired with a lucidity of expression — even when the narrative progression messily avoids easy conclusions the way life so often seems to go.
Lurching lead single "When You're Breaking My Heart" sums up the mess Gatlin finds herself in on I Sleep Fine Now, realizing that she actually liked someone better when they weren't into her over a propulsive drum pattern. Her oblong voice is a resonant, all-encompassing conduit for every conflicting, illogical feeling you've ever had, and her storytelling ability gives the grand "pop's Lucinda Williams" declaration in her press notes legs.
"Don't wanna know that you switched shampoos / But you're sitting so close, and my nose works," dropped in the first verse of the wistful "Paris," is a prime example of the dry humour Gatlin bakes into her matter-of-fact admissions while she waxes lyrical about heartbreak and loneliness, the primary subject matter of I Sleep Fine Now. Often, in my experience anyway, that and clarity tend to go hand-in-hand. I kind of think closure is a myth, but the singer-songwriter seems to have found hers — or at least something close to it — here.