Avery Tucker - Paw

As one half of Los Angeles duo Girlpool, Avery Tucker was responsible for the kind of indie that sits wide-eyed at the crosshair between rock and pop; saccharine and heart-on-sleeve confessional. There’s - naturally - a line to trace between that outfit’s four records and this debut solo album: not least on ‘Malibu’, where a simple arrangement meets slacker style vocals, and the ‘90s alternative of ‘Dusk’, a track which delivers a series of blink-and-you’ll-miss it lyrical gut punches (“Go by her house / To take things off the walls / Put on her necklace / That you’ll never take off”). But here, his work takes on a darker hue, as the record see-saws between intimate, often bleak sounding classic singer-songwriter fare, and earwormy emo.


It’s the latter of these which stands out, and occasionally in unexpected ways: best of the bunch is ‘Rust’, which answers a question few knew would be posed: what would happen if Angelo Badalamenti were to record a My Chemical Romance song? “Can you learn to love what’s happened to you?” Avery asks, sending his query into the ether in a manner that’s somehow simultaneously resigned and resolute, while the understated production prevents his pleading vocal style from over-egging his point: a subtle - yet wholly permeating - earworm if there ever was one. ‘Baby Broke’ hints more at the style’s earlier wave. Notably, too, on ‘Angel’, MUNA’s Katie Gavin provides a pleasing contrast, her backing vocals soaring above Avery’s lead, echoed by the use of folkish strings.


While the gravelly tones of opener ‘Like I’m Young’ bristle and, later, crash into life in a wholly Bright Eyes-esque manner, and his breaking vocal in ‘Big Drops’ adds to its softly glum atmosphere, it’s only by closer ‘11’ that the two sides feel to co-exist seamlessly. Here, Avery’s whispered delivery is used in what begins as a standard pseudo-epic album bookend, but instead develops with increased clarity as the track progresses, a musical end to the album’s mental slump courtesy of A. G. Cook. It ties the various threads of ‘Paw’ together in a satisfying manner, and in turn makes it a satisfying album.