Though The A.V. Club is gearing up for our 2024 in review package, which kicks off on December 16 with the best TV shows of the year, this week's Staff Picks focus on a debut album you might have missed and a 2023 documentary that feels especially pertinent at the moment.
Myriad though TikTok's issues may be—stealing our data, ruining our attention spans, and negatively transforming the music industry—it has been a great platform for sharing and discovering new artists. That's how I found Sarah Kinsley, the 24-year-old singer-songwriter and prodigious musical talent behind the album Escaper. Kinsley first gained a following on the app by sharing her process for writing and creating music. Her first track to go really viral was "The King" from her 2021 EP of the same name; she struck a chord again in 2022 with her heartbreaking single "The Giver." Personally, I couldn't get enough of "Green" from her EP Cypress, one of my top-streamed songs of 2022.
A former music theory student at Columbia University, Kinsley signed to a label in 2023 (Verve/Decca Records) and earlier this year, she released her debut album, Escaper. After years of self-producing her work, Escaper also marks her first time collaborating with a producer in the studio. John Congleton, who has worked with St. Vincent, Angel Olsen, Sharon Van Etten, and more, proved to be a perfect fit for Kinsley's sensibilities. St. Vincent and Angel Olsen are good points of comparison for Kinsley, as is her onetime tourmate Mitski. Like predecessor Kate Bush, Kinsley's clear, sometimes near-operatic vocal and classically-infused style doesn't fit neatly within the current pop landscape. But it sets her apart and makes the songs all the more compelling.
Thematically, Escaper is what it sounds like: a diversion into imagined alternate worlds untouched or transformed by love and loss. Kinsley nimbly whirls and twirls through the more upbeat tracks like album opener "Last Time We Never Meet Again" or "My Name Is Dancing" into something with a rockier edge like "Matter." But as she proved with "The Giver," it's the heartwrenching ballads that best showcase Kinsley's power. Her voice is so crisp and compelling on songs like "Barrel Of Love" and "Knights," accompanied by orchestral swells that illustrate why the artist describes her own music as "cinematic pop."
Escaper is the most robust example yet of Kinsley carving her own path in the music industry. Even with an assist from Congleton, her fingerprints are on every aspect of the album: a TikTok shared this summer demonstrates her playing basically every instrument you hear on it, from piano to violin to glass singing bowls and beyond. The lyrics, too, are poetic and polished ("I had a name before we met / But all the letters never sat right / But on your tongue, I see them dancing / On your lips, thеy come alive," she sings on "My Name Is Dancing"), suggesting a wisdom beyond her years. Overall, the album is confident, unique, and a breath of fresh air—if this is just the beginning for Sarah Kinsley, it's an exciting time to get on board. [Mary Kate Carr]
My recommendation this week comes with an asterisk or two (look, we're in the thick of best-of coverage, please allow me this ambivalence). Join Or Die, a new documentary inspired by Robert Putnam's opus Bowling Alone: The Collapse And Revival Of American Community, opens with the plaintive line, "This is a film about why you should join a club." Directors Pete Davis, who studied under Putnam at Harvard, and his sister Rebecca Davis latch on to Bowling Alone's provocative premise—that fostering community in smaller enclaves can lead to broader national unity—frame their documentary as a rallying cry as they chart the inversely proportional relationship between civic engagement and good governance. As you watch various archival images of clubs of yesteryear juxtaposed with those out of Charlottesville, North Carolina in August 2017, interspersed with colorful charts flashing worrying statistics about trust in government leaders, it's easy to get swept up in the flood of emotions. There's a good chance you'll at least want to set up a movie night with friends after finishing it. I know my head started spinning with thoughts on how to reestablish a sense of community here at the ol' A.V. Club.
But, as with so many calls to action that tug on the heartstrings, once the initial emotional surge subsides, you're left with a lot of questions—ones that, to be fair, might be answered by Putnam's book, which I haven't read. The Davis siblings (nice touch, making this documentary about the power of the collective a family affair) raise certain subjects, like the racial dynamics of these clubs, without really exploring them. There's simply too much to cover, even with Glenn Loury, the economist and academic whose definition of "social capital" was foundational to Putnam's book, offering some insights into his work. You could argue that's a topic for a whole other documentary, but racial dynamics in this country are just as key to understanding the current political schism as looking back fondly at bowling leagues. And they're hard to ignore when looking at historical photos of smiling people in various clubs who just so happen to be the same race.
Ultimately, like so many other "how did we get here?" projects, Join Or Die acts as more of a conversation starter than a definitive answer. But there's value in that. Neither Putnam, who's been dubbed the "poet laureate of civil society," nor the directors are so naive as to think that simply talking to each other will resolve all of our issues. What they have done is give new life to the old maxim: "think globally, act locally." [Danette Chavez]
