Cassandra Jenkins – My Light, My Destroyer
Cassandra Jenkins stargazes her way into glistening enlightenment on her newest album My Light, My Destroyer
The only functional places in the cosmos for Cassandra Jenkins to be are pining under city streetlights or deep within outer orbit, everywhere else is disingenuous. She has a radiant, spectral soul, equal parts romantic and existential. Her angle in sophisti-pop is like broken glass being suspended in spacetime: glistening and still. She’s at home crooning over broken drumlines and airy synths, but can pop out a distorted guitar to attention-check her crowd with ease. It’s an effortlessly dynamic approach for an artist whose narratives often handle lofty themes.
Jenkins’ body of work is in tune to natural and spiritual wavelengths usually withheld for monks and Adrianne Lenker. Romance is often the setup where the unfortunate punchline is mortality. Hard Drive, a standout from her previous record An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, was a test of her non-linear, emotive narrative style. Hard drive could mean a computer, the storage ability of the human soul, or Jenkins’ physical inability to drive at the time. Implant that teleology into an entire record, where Jenkins makes a broad stroke every time she looks up at the sky, and My Light, My Destroyer becomes a web of love and grandeur.
Most importantly, there’s the William Shatner rainbow connection, whose themes permeate the listen. She recalls the bereavement Shatner felt when he first saw the petty majesty of human life in the context of the vastness of space, squarely in between her own fascinations of self and other. If Jenkins is the poster child for anything, it’s that there’s always a place for yourself in the vastness of time and space.
It’s a striking, and very human, proposition throughout the record that grief and anticipatory awe can exist as a singular emotion, in a blip on the cosmic scale; the overwhelming ego death of human self-importance and the perfect realisation of its own in-spite beauty, that love and death are on the same spectrum. What a world we live in where a stranger can be your light and your shadow, one often because of the other. We meander like the rock beneath our feet, hurtling without trajectory, but enraptured by invented, triumphant purpose, simply because there’s nothing more perfect to do than love and die.
Listen to: Only One, Omakase, Devotion