Listening to Tess Parks's third solo album Pomegranate, I couldn't stop thinking about critic Malcolm Jack's encapsulation of the psychedelic-rock singer and songwriter's voice. It's a description used as the hero quotation on her Wikipedia page, which, summarizing the quality of her voice, says it is "so drawling and ragged that Parks sounds like she's been gargling bong water." It made me indignant the first time I read it, because it seems so everyday, such an unglamorous way to describe something as otherworldly as Parks's voice, its breathy beauty like parchment against stone. To be fair, though, visually jarring as Jack's words are, they offer a technically apt description — Parks's voice is indeed jagged and smoky. But it's also something more graceful and poignant, a bit less macabre than a bong water gargle.
I kept rolling Jack's description around in my mind as I listened to Pomegranate, feeling its truth in the face of such obviously ethereal beauty, because it's such a compelling juxtaposition, because juxtapositions are something that Pomegranate deals in. It's most evident on the album's second track, deliciously named "California's Dreaming." That the dream is a lie — the American Dream, maybe, the fantasy of working hard and reaping our labour's rewards eventually, the pursuit of the future at the cost of the present — is as apparent as looking up at the sky, she sings in her hallucinatory whisper, before going on to recount a memory: "We found you clapping / Clapping at the rose parade / Left with all the shit that you made." The stunning wordplay, the biting contrast, it doesn't feel so much a condemnation as it does a jolt to the system, a lifting up of the emerald veil to reveal things as they really are.
This is an album that celebrates and elevates the mundane, which, despite being disjointed and ragged and broken some of the time, maybe even lacklustre, is constant reality for most of us. It is true all of the time, because it is us. We are the mundane, Parks shows, by holding it up against that which is sold as aspirational, that which is always glittering with its facade; but in the comparison Parks stenographs, the aspirational is revealed in its true hollow form, never stable or even achievable, and so ultimately useless and false. Pomegranate is sharp and vibrant, like a pulled pin it explodes lofty ideas and ideals, dreams sold to us by mainstream culture and reigning ideologies, and offers the everyday as something worth celebrating.
"You put on a good show / You put on a really good show," Parks sings on "Koalas," a track that carries the soul of all of Noel Gallagher's best in one — the piano grand, the acoustic guitar a quill, the drums a strident funeral march for misguided ambition. It also carries the album's thesis: "We're all out looking for / Something, anything this time," she sings. "All we see or seen is we're two of the same kind." The track, indeed the album itself, charts a search that can never be successfully completed, a search for the meaning we've been promised, the stability and rest and success that all the pipe-dreams sketch. Parks reminds us that whatever it is we've been told to look for, it can't be found for it was never real.
Pomegranate would be a masterful album if it simply ended with this discovery, but Parks makes a veritable gift of it by offering a solution to, maybe a balm against the frustrations her discovery contains. "It feels like everyone should be dancing," she sings during the jeweled and jubilant chorus of "Koalas." "Maybe I should be dancing / Sometimes it feels like everyone should be dancing." Hope can be found in the face of the unremitting concrete of drudgery sold as The Dream; The ideals we've bought into may be bankrupt, but this doesn't mean that the big bang ought to be reversed. Instead, we ought to celebrate our feelings, the fact of our lives at all. Parks kicks off an emboldening, humanist celebration as she re-centres us in our own lives. California's dream, "the good show," they all make efficient systems of us, but they also rob us of ourselves. And so Parks brings us back: to feelings, to seemings, to dancing, to being unproductive and yet filled with and spreading joy. "If only you could see yourself how everyone sees you," Parks sings to us on "Koalas."
A lively current runs through Pomegranate, politically cognizant and charged. Parks's voice has always reminded me of Hope Sandoval's, carrying her hazy and gravelly cool. But while Rolling Stone described Sandoval and Mazzy Star's sound as "a foreboding, sluggish swirl of dark sound and fragile melody" dealing sentiments that are ultimately "bleak," Parks's sound is best described as a somnolent hopefulness. "Charlie Potato" carries a grunge soul, but is electrified, lacking the hopeless clangor of the '90s. An insistently plucked electric guitar and satiny drums keep time as a piano and flute lilt and twirl, and Parks's hushed voice breathes to life a poem that is a near manifesto about "taking our lives back." Though slowly intentional, nothing here is foreboding or stagnant. "We never give up, we grow, everyone grows up," she prophecies. "We say no when we mean it and as often as we like / Without fear." It's a painting of the future that is realizable today, containing prescriptions of everyday gratefulness, exercising little freedoms such as saying "yes" and "no" with self-honour, exploring, walking, all in an effort to achieve a life more bountiful and fulfilling than anything the past contains. "You'll see, you'll see," she repeats, it's all possible, you'll see. If Sandoval was bleak, slouching toward unfulfilled hope, then Parks is strident even as she is tender, radical even as her voice is gauzy, dauntlessly leading toward hope.
She often seems like a seer, her voice sounding choked and raspy with happy tears at the latent beauty of our lives. And it's all not just a lesson for us, either. On "Bagpipe Blues," the effervescent album opener moody as a Portishead song, Parks teaches by example. "I know all my mistakes / I live with them everyday," she sings with her at once airy and rough-hewn voice, "But I'm gonna try to see everything as a goddamn miracle." We can clap inanely at the rose parade, but maybe it's more worthwhile to take stock of what we actually have, the life we've actually built in the pursuit of all these ideals — maybe we should just enjoy this shit that we've made. I see now that if the mundane is to be celebrated, then maybe there really is an easy glamour to a bong water gargle. With all the gusto of a street preacher's pamphlet and all the grace of a love letter, Pomegranate takes stock of the past and future to remind us to be alive, now.