“The blues” summons a bevy of specific sounds: the piercing riffs of Big Mama Thornton, the scratching strums of Memphis Minnie, the brazen swagger of Bessie Smith, the relaxed picking of Algia Mae Hinton. But more than chord progressions or meter counting, the blues are about feeling, about looking demons in the eye and calling them by name. Silences, the second LP from Nashville’s Adia Victoria, scans like a biting, lush indie rock record, but it’s a blues album in this pure sense. As she cavorts with and squares off against demons across these dozen tracks, Victoria positions herself as a 21st-century heir to the blues, honoring traditions while eagerly bucking them.
Silences takes its title from the 1962 book of the same name by first-wave feminist Tillie Olsen, a reflection on the yawning void in artistic canons that came with excluding women from serious consideration. Victoria’s corrective measure is mighty. Working with producer and the National guitarist Aaron Dessner, she lets these dense arrangements occupy every corner of the mix. “Clean” opens with slumping, bowed strings, descending with the drama of a diva floating down a grand staircase. Atmospheric guitars, electronics, and saxophones lend Victoria support as she sneers. Her vocals remain cool and controlled, as if she’s refusing to let trouble get the best of her.
Victoria brings jagged-edge attitude to the hard-charging “Different Kind of Love” and the determined “Pacolet Road,” where she sings about escaping the South to do “everything in the world that my grandma ever wished she had.” There are moments of gentler reflection, too, as on the lilting “The City,” which Victoria adorns with a sample of Billie Holiday crooning “Lady Sings the Blues.” With “Get Lonely,” a poignant twist on love-song tropes, Victoria yearns for an intimacy that may be untenable: “Maybe you’ve prayed your demons away/But something tells me mine are here to stay,” she sings.
The foes here are both internal and external—betrayal, prejudice, temptation, herself. Victoria approaches these familiar struggles not with lowdown defeat but with frank acknowledgement of the trouble they give her, letting listeners into these intimate battles. “I like the things that make me hurt,” she admits on “Devil Is a Lie,” a wry, stuttering waltz of horns and pizzicato strings. “You give an inch, they take a mile/No, you will not make me smile.” It is a lament and taunt within a single breath. On “Nice Folks,” she takes do-gooders to task, noting that they drag her down and silence her without recognizing the harm they do. The track’s climactic drum break feels apocalyptic, as if Victoria herself were summoning heaven and hell to right such wrongs.
Victoria buttons up Silences with “Dope Queen Blues,” a powerhouse reiteration of her battle to emerge triumphant in a world that wants to flatten her—the culmination of her ruination, as she sings in the refrain. But as Victoria makes clear during Silences, demons don’t have to be all bad news; if we have the power to name and shame them, we have the power to have a little fun with them, too.
