After Helen Ballentine abandoned a degree in graphic design and a full-time job in a gallery to pursue music in earnest, she adopted the stage alias
Skullcrusher for an eponymous debut EP that was ultimately released by indie powerhouse Secretly Canadian. Two years later, she returns to the EP's ambient and folk influences for a full-length debut written in isolation during a heat wave in Los Angeles and heavily inspired by memories of her childhood in Mount Vernon, New York. Adding more expansive electronics, spoken-word clips, and field recordings to the EP's gentle merger of acoustic instruments, electric bass, and synthesizer,
Quiet the Room was recorded with EP collaborator Noah Weinman along with producer
Andrew Sarlo (
Big Thief,
Hovvdy) at a studio on a farm near Ballentine's hometown. While some of the 14 tracks here are more atmosphere than song, it opens with the structured, softly strummed "They Quiet the Room," whose gossamer multi-tracked vocals set a fittingly subdued tone. The track eventually disintegrates into sustained synths and strings, a circular piano scale, percussive tremolos, and amplified static. Some of the other more atmospheric tracks include the melodic and reverb-heavy "(secret instrumental)"; "Whistle of the Dead," which sets recordings of crickets and a child singing to sparse musical accompaniment; and "Lullaby in February," which is part brittle acoustic guitar song and part ambient noise experiment. Among the more formalized songs are the tuneful, banjo-injected "Whatever Fits Together," which plays most like a 7" pick; the almost shoegazey "Sticker"; and dreamy indie folk outing "It's Like a Secret," whose impressionistic lyrics include snapshots of places, moments, and feelings ("I can't measure it/The asymptotic miss/The place I want to be/The one I cannot see"). All seeming woven together midair, like parts of the same cumulonimbus cloud,
Quiet the Room ends on "You are My House," a relatively uplifting appreciation of self and of taking up space, which fades out quickly on melodic mechanical effects, as if the album dissolves into the home's walls and plumbing. While some of the record's lyrics are lost in ambiance, Ballentine's ethereal vocals are a key component of an artful sound design that, like a movie, is optimized in its full-length context. ~ Marcy Donelson