Edith Frost: In Space

“So sorry it’s been forever, and a day / I couldn’t think of much of anything to say,” sings Edith Frost on The Bastards. One of the many poignant junctures on her first LP in 20 years, In Space. 

Frost’s songs are like long lost friends. Her voice, leaking out if the speakers like tears, but through the heartbreak that the Austin, Texas-based songwriter has always dealt exclusively in, there’s a strange comfort in it.

Heading for that same reef during It’s A Game’s opening song, Emergency, the stories dotted throughout In Space are just as emotionally vexing. Frost’s songwriting, like a flow-state, and carefully sculpting her songs around soft inflections of psychedelia, they feel aligned to the world now more than ever.

During Frost’s fantastic run during the mid ’90s and ’00s, a time when – by and large – the blues and country seemed out of vogue, Frost was the decade’s answer to Jimmy Campbell, peddling her pain in her own ways. As she sang on Calling Over Time’s opening track, Temporary Loan, “I sing the blues every night,” and true to her word, things haven’t changed on In Space.

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Recorded at Chicago’s The Loft with Mark Greenberg and Rian Murphy, Frost also drafted in Jim Becker (ex-Califone), Sima Cunningham (Finom, formerly OHMME), Jeff Ragsdale and Drag City labelmate, Bill MacKay, who all add subtle embellishments throughout these 12 songs.

Starting with Another Year. Perhaps the only song on In Space where Frost’s story is eclipsed by sheer sonic beauty, she conjures up a floaty, sleepy-eyed serenade that underlines just how much she has been missed. Nothing Comes Around sees the weather getting heavier, as Frost professes that she is “Still alright, making my sound… Nothing the matter with my world … I’ve got a travelling circus of my own”. It’s that contrarian spirit that has always made her songs like gold dust for the devoted few.

There are moments throughout In Space where Frost hasn’t sounded so fierce. On the quasi-country lament, What A Drag, her honesty is strident (“Maybe we can try / To ruin both our lives / To grow into something stronger”). On the Floydian-tinged Something About the War, she moves further afield (“Leave them floating on or even casting out a line / Don’t leave them all behind”). The geopolitical landscape adding another layer to Frost’s everyday anxieties. So too The Bastard, where, indeed, that “funny world has gone away”, swept aside for financial interests and all the greed it brings.

Meanwhile, Hold On sees Frost morphing into gunslinger mode, highlighting the vagueness and hopelessness that can slowly turn relationships to dust (“Baby get off it, or maybe get on / You can move over whenever you want”). The roadhouse blues of Can’t Sleep goes to even greater depths, as Frost scours the floor to find pieces of a broken heart (“You’re not telling me who I want to be to get free”).

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It’s a brutal line and only topped by Back Again, where Frost is at her acerbic best; that same broken heart, remade out of the stone. “I’d rather go blind than see you one more time,” she sings, delivered with steel and poise like never before. It’s something akin to Insignificance-era Jim O’Rourke, as Frost beautifully juxtaposes scorn with a gentle keyboard line designed for background music in a Michelin star restaurant. Essentially, it’s that moment where high watermark songcraft is crystalised.

Little Sign is a little straighter down the line. An AM radio ditty that makes ordinary folk feel 10 feet tall, (“You don’t need no affirmation to get up on your feet… Get happy with your mind”), it’s not the only time Frost sees light at the end of the tunnel. On closing track, I Still Love You, she engineers the same optimism as another of her album closers (It’s A Game’s You’re Decided). Both times, Frost asking the question of love and seemingly coming to the same conclusion as most of us: Can’t live with it, can’t live without it…

In an age where all roads to Nashville where superficial heartbreak and manufactured sound have commodified country into something insipid and insufferable, Edith Frost blows the competition away by simply being herself. Songcraft instilled with street-level sincerity, Frost exposes life’s ups and downs with honesty and straight talking, making her, indeed, the real deal. And In Space is another shining example of that.

In Space is out via Drag City. Purchase from Bandcamp.