“I give my time like an autograph / and I’m always running out of ink,” Caroline Glaser, also known as brother bird, sings on the single, “Something Better,” off her new album, another year. It is raucous and charming, the way that The Beths or Hop Along are. But most of the album is a bit more perhaps like Sufjan Stevens’ hushed chamber folk, with the same dark existential quandaries. “We’ve got nothing to lose / if we’re all gonna die,” she sings in the 70’s reminiscent, “state of mind.”

“Am I trading the dark / for a new state of mind?” she asks in the same song. And you could argue that turning any semi-terrifying circumstances into art is an act of hope, in and of itself. But it is overall a beautiful but sad album, to soundtrack youth on the precipice of aging, the ennui of the suburbs, and a life where holidays are the only relief from the onslaught of young adult life, though even the holidays present us with uncertainty.

The music and composition throughout is stunning and the poetry is expertly crafted, in a diaristic but descriptive fashion. “Curtains and couches in burgundy / The glow of the tv / I melted into you / Purple and blue.” It’s moments like that which provide the comfort and familiarity much needed in Caroline’s often bleak world. Love is a holding on, despite death and disaster’s certainty. “The best things in life / Are the hardest to hold / And the first to go.”

It is powerful for its song craft, but powerful also for its brutal honesty. Like her project name, brother bird, (and the bird noises to open the album,) there are plenty of silver linings. Remembering being young and dreaming of being “famous.” Imagining that there is “something better” around the corner, a trick it seems she needs just to keep going. It is an album filled with interesting stories and golden turns of phrase. An album worthy of her peers, and that I think will soundtrack her listener’s lives with charm and charisma, without sugar coating life’s bleaker realities.

Order Another Year by Brother Bird HERE