Spectreview: Julia Shapiro – Zorked

Released: October 15, 2021

Alternative
(Indie Rock)
(Slowcore)

-RED-

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Over the last eight years, Julia Shapiro has nailed the art of the downer record. The wiry roughness of Chastity Belt’s earliest material has now definitively given way to music that feels intertwined with the endless gray skies of the Seattle winter, its dark chords and foggy atmosphere working like heated blankets on dispossessed hearts. This is how it is, and seemingly how it always will be. Depression doesn’t leave so easily after all, especially when there’s not much you can do to break out of habit and right the course.

Produced by previous collaborator and current roommate Melina Duterte (Jay Som), Zorked continues Shapiro’s dive into smudginess, enervation and exquisite tunefulness.  Her second solo release floats with the same gorgeous warmth that lifted Chastity Belt’s recent self-titled, but the songs are overall heavier and more dissonant than usual. Purportedly because of the lockdown that occurred immediately after her move, Shapiro’s translocation to comparatively-sunny Los Angeles hasn’t had much of an effect on her songs: “Death (XIII)’s” ominous title is matched by weighty distortion over its slowcore doggedness, while “Zorked” circulates a thick series of chords in perpetuity and “Come With Me” indulges in the minor key as Shapiro struggles through a bad trip.

Indeed, her lyrics typically match such heaviness. Whether it’s the hyperbole-laden offerings of “Wrong Time,” the rotten relationship at the core of the self-loathing “Someone,” or the chorus of “Hellscape” that’s anchored by a solitary “fuck,” Zorked routinelyfinds Shapiro at her most overtly negative. The difference is that, unlike the uneasy deep breath of I Used To Spend’s “I’m Fine” or the gentle smear of Perfect Version’s “Empty Cup,” this record has no light at the end of its tunnel. It’s instead refracted in “Hall of Mirrors,” a ghostly acoustic closer that finds Shapiro trapped in some layered space – her new house, her old demons. The addition of pitch-warbling synths and ambient drones further intensifies the song’s cloistering environment. To these ears, it’s one of her best songs yet.

It’s tough to want to ask more from an artist whose raison d’être is coping with the irrationality of depressive thought, but if Chastity Belt’s critical issue was its sweeping sense of fatigue, Zorked noticeably continues that trend. There’s not much here we haven’t seen Shapiro do before both sonically and lyrically, and while there’s a poignant self-awareness in hearing her struggle with the same problems she’s written about years before (waking up bleary-eyed to her phone on “Hellscape,” kicking herself for daring to complain on “Do Nothing About It”) your appreciation of this record will likely come down to how much you desire (or require) spending time in the same murky spaces she’s built time and time again. It’s also worth reminding that artists are not required to change up their MO, and what Zorked does best is remind us of the style she’s come to master: a deft cross between melodiousness and sheer darkness, evoking the addictive nature of living life chronically low.

Recommended for feeling real crummy.