To embrace autumn is to make peace with oncoming death. It means surrendering to all the wonderful nuance–and relief–of finally fucking unravelling. Homegirl, the debut LP by Brooklyn indie staple Pink Slater (Tim Poovey of Night Dawgs), is an autumnal adieu to love affairs come undone.
And Slater’s farewell comes in shimmering. The album’s first track, “Angel,” is a lyrically matter-of-fact but sonically forlorn force that raises a toast to what once was, like the brass section at a Big Easy funeral. Throughout Homegirl, one gets the sense that frontman and composer Tim Poovey’s regular use of the second person is aimed at a party of one–an ex–but out of the gate, “Angel” solidifies that this album is by no means any kind of pity party, or plea. No, it’s a last waltz with a ghost to say, I’ve failed here, “Let my heart break.”
In fact, from low-to-mid-tempo, the pulse of the entire album is panged abandon. Synths, bells beats and brass chime in as prevalently as Slater’s guitar harmonies, a melancholic force always threatening to pull us under. Grace, meet despair. Such dichotomies are the jet fuel of timeless pop complexities like “Hard to Explain” by the Strokes, Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream”, Springsteen's’ “Born to Run”, or anything ever written by the Cure ever. But it’s Pink Slater tracks like, “Dream Catcher,” and “Red Lights” with its somber tones and childlike refrains, that marry contradiction so well you’d swear you were on a fall field trip through liquor store lighting.
Ultimately, Homegirl is a strummed out, glittery celebration of love and life lost—and how we’ll live right on through it. Like how the death of summer means your next run through amber leaves, or how a dying star is a lifetime of muted twinkles here on earth.
It’s only the secret to everything.