In the five years since Tracy Bonham’s last album, everything that helped push her into the spotlight — Lilith Fair, “women in rock”, indie co-optation — has likewise been absent. None of that has returned or seems likely to, but Blink The Brightest shows she has survived, glowing softly but insistently.
Glowing differently, too. In the late 1990s, Bonham could easily have been lumped in with all the other angry young women firing their bile-loaded afterburners in the wake of Alanis Morissette’s jetstream. Now, with most of those women burned out or just gone, Bonham more closely resembles a scarred and wiser type, an Aimee Mann in training.
The Abbey Road-ish production bears out this impression, as does an increased quaver of vulnerable yearning in Bonham’s conventionally strong, supple voice. The songs themselves present the final evidence, simultaneously hopeful and hopeless about love, dreamily wistful (“Something Beautiful”) or realistically bittersweet (“I Was Born Without You”), or both (“Take Your Love Out On Me”).
Bonham’s modest distinctions sometimes lean the wrong way. In the strained carnival atmosphere of “Dumbo Sun”, her arch observations edge toward camp, and throughout Blink The Brightest she appears reluctant to let a song or emotion stand naked when she can access another multitracked moment. On the other hand, when she sheds second thoughts, as on the soulful piano ballad “Whether You Fall” or the acoustic-strummed “Did I Sleep Through It All?”, she generates a kind of internal illumination.
