Spectreview: Lisa Prank – Perfect Love Song

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“Don’t know what I need, but I need too much
Are there any words that could clear this up?”

Robin Edwards tackles pop-punk with a purist’s spirit, cranking out her brief, traditionally-structured tracks with machine precision. What she’s done especially well, ever since her breakout album in 2016, is provide an insight into the headspace of an adult artist that strives to make perennially adolescent music. It’s the kind of headspace that’s becoming gradually more relatable as time passes and the old markers for “success” become ever more antiquated. Where Adult Teen introduced Lisa Prank as a proverbial lemonade stand for daily grievances and uncomfortable circumstances, Perfect Love Song adds a stronger sense of thematic focus -along with a acoustic drum kit- to her musings on dissatisfaction. The expanded sound, along with that newfound focus, makes the album immediately feel like a graduation of her art without sacrificing much of the playfulness made her original material so compelling.

Love, like music, are heart languages, penetrating our senses and our brain patterns in ways that oftentimes completely fail traditional communication. Perhaps that’s why love has remained the prime subject in written music for so long. Edwards’ experiences with a recently failed love spurred the content of Perfect Love Song, but the grand trick she pulls is her balance between specificity and universality, the way she takes the gnarly details of that relationship and weaves them insightfully into a common experience. Throughout the album, Edwards gamely puts herself back in that precarious place, finding herself in places familiar to any other lovelorn individual. On the affecting “Ignore It,” she chooses the comfortable lie over the devastation of reality; on tracks like “Brighton Blvd” and “Get Mad” she finds clarity only after the fact. She doesn’t pull any punches either, considering the high-profile nature of her role in the Seattle underground scene, there are times when the album feels like a straight callout a la early Liz Phair, and those in that scene may find themselves bristling at the revelations. That’s the rightful prerogative of the scorned though, and it results in some of her best material yet, from the whip-smart kiss-off of “IUD” to the uncharacteristically melancholy “Telescope.” Starting and finishing strong, all with the force of a live band to boot, Perfect Love Song once again hits that heady blend of simplicity and raw honesty that makes Lisa Prank an ideal representative for PNW pop-punk.

Recommended on the way to your therapist appointment.