Artist: Bitter's Kiss
Album: Bitter's Kiss
Label: Self Released
Release Date: 03/24/2015
Bitter’s Kiss, the current project of New Jersey-based singer-songwriter Chloe Baker, takes listeners through the ebbs and flows of life’s many emotions. In the album’s tightly woven eight tracks, Baker sings about redemption, love, joy and pain with a voice that’s delicate, but also able to match Elle King’s confidence and Lorde’s haunting, airy vibes.
The self-titled release stands as Baker’s exploratory diary of sorts – of herself and of the world around her. She’s young and wears that on her sleeve, but her voice is strong enough to root for. Some tracks may seem naive on the surface. In “Love Won’t Make You Cry” she sings: “Love won’t tear you down, call you names, or laugh at your pain…Love won’t beat you or burn you.” But what some might call naivety, other might construe as optimistic and hopeful, an outed hopeless romantic.
Things get much darker on “The Rope,” a track written about the suicide of an overly religious cousin. She expresses her own religious feelings, singing: “I have sat through your church service listening for a word I could embrace, staring into the preacher’s eyes searching for the soul behind the face… there’s a quicker way to heaven, if you can find yourself a rope.” It’s a chilling track that is by far the album’s best.
For any weaknesses found here—it’s a little too safe, stylistically—Baker shows heaps of potential. I’d love to see what she can do with pop-ier or even edgier material a la Angel Olsen. With that voice of hers, anything’s possible.
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