Tinged with Arctic Monkeys/The Last Shadow Puppets flair in spades, Alexandra Savior’s sophomore follow up to 2017’s Belladonna of Sadness, co-written with Alex Turner, the frontman for both of the aforementioned bands, is an homage to the heartbroken everywhere. And while one would think that Turner’s sound would be all over her debut, in retrospect, Belladonna of Sadness lacks his distinctive mark. Instead, it seems to appear more prominently on the new record, The Archer (a title Taylor Swift does not have the monopoly on). And just as Belladonna of Sadness was written two years before it finally came out, so, too, has The Archer long been in the works, with Savior commencing the title track in 2016.
Commenting on the notion that, during that period, in something of a Lana Del Rey parallel, she had reconciled with surrendering to the idea that she wouldn’t make music anymore, at least not at the “fame level” (just as Del Rey had bowed to while writing “Video Games”), Savior stated, “I was living with my mum and going to community college and thought that I was never going to make another record again. I was dropped [by the label] about a year after the first [album] came out. I wrote the song ‘The Archer’ on Christmas 2016.” So it was that the crux of the record was born. One that starts with the fittingly surreal and melancholic “Soft Currents.” The simple lyrics lament, “Seven years, I’ve had seven years of bad luck/And I’m just fine/Happiness I find happiness in the wrong places/Every time.” Even if that’s the case, in either her professional or personal life (more especially intertwined when one is a musician), she has ostensibly learned with time that, “My fate is at the hands of my mistakes/And that’s alright.” The ambient gloom of this acceptance segues effortlessly into “Saving Grace.”
Psychedelic to its core and filled with sweeping, overpowering guitar riffs, “Saving Grace” takes a page from 2013’s AM, on which Arctic Monkeys reached the zenith of their guitar usage, perhaps inevitably leading to the subsequent piano-favoring Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino. With lyrics that serve as a means to paint so-called Saving Grace as some sort of cruel drag queen dangling the potential for salvation before ripping it away, Savior sings, “Saving grace/Come here to petrify me/She’s not an angel, my dear/She is a beast.” In other words, do not trust her, she is a fugly slut.
And don’t trust the security of relationships for that matter, either, Savior soon apprehended after being dropped by her first label, Columbia Records. Of the “breakup,” Savior remarked, “…so a lot of the songs that I was writing before I got dropped, I was intentionally trying to impress this label that I wasn’t really suited for. When I had that freedom, it felt like I’d write the songs and they would just go into the abyss because there was nobody for me to send them to and and nobody was listening at all. But then I think that’s probably what made them a lot more personal than my last record.” So it was that she had a sort of Lady Gaga in “Marry the Night” experience, which occurred right around the same time as a romantic breakup that led to the creation of “Crying All the Time” on New Year’s Day, 2018. The moody, Sam Cohen-produced backbeat paired with the lament, “My death, it taunts me like a ship/Without a sail I know I’ll be gone soon/But just for him, I will prevail,” smacks, indeed, of a Del Rey/Turner lovechild, further compounded by the irony, “He doesn’t like it when I cry/And now he’s gone, so I’m crying all the time.”
The sultry overtone of the appropriately mating call-esque “Howl” solidifies the jilted lover theme of the record, as well as Savior’s adeptness at making spartan lyrics feel varied, with the only non-repeated verse of the song being, “Handsome dictator of my crimes/I can’t tell if they’re yours, I can’t tell if they’re mine/Sweet revelation bitter wine/I’m dreaming, but mostly I’m feeling behind.” With the fine line blurred between whether or not she’s responsible for her actions or the toxic love manipulating them is irrelevant after a certain point, and Savior must admit, “It’s a little dangerous when you come treading by me.” And yet how could we, as her listeners, not with a record like this”
The midpoint of The Archer, “Send Her Back,” persists with the laconic lyrics, the chorus, “Why don’t you send her back where she came from?” being easily applicable to both a mother after birthing her child or a boyfriend after rejecting his girlfriend of so many years. Whatever your particular interpretation as a result of your own personal situation, “Send Her Back” certainly inflicts some deep-seated feels. Of the kind that her unwitting mentor, Alex Turner, also knows too well about–not to mention how to evoke within his own listeners. As for the comparisons to their styles, let’s just say, “Can’t Help Myself,” which happens to be the sixth track on the album, opening with the sound of ambient waves washing ashore (likely a common sound when one is from the same Pacific Northwest milieu as Savior). More tinged with sardonic 60s girl group flair than some of the others, the song bears an additional tonal resemblance to the 60s stylings of Del Rey on “Radio” (as when she sings, “Now my life is sweet like cinnamon…/My body’s sweet like sugar venom, oh yeah”) and Arctic Monkeys on “Black Treacle.” Savior, in fatalistic turn, expresses, “Light dims as he walks my way/I’ve been running for a reason I could never retain/Sweet lips like pink lemonade/When he’s feeling generous he’s gonna give me a taste/’Cause nothing else can satisfy me/Oh, oh, I can’t help myself/Something comes over me, baby/Whenever you are around.” Such a sentiment transitions seamlessly into a song title like “The Phantom,” all rife with the connotations of being haunted by the object of one’s affection. Discussing the common phenomenon in unrequited love that essentially finds one person being more of an erotomaniac than the other (e.g. “I fell in love alone”), Savior reconciles the cult-like tendencies of the one she truly believed could love her as much in return, describing with the poetic turn of phrase we’ve come to expect by now, “Fell in love as a lone disciple/His altar at the root of my fate/Fell in love on a lonely night/Could predict every word he’d never convey.”
More languorous in rhythm than the others, “Bad Disease” is peak “creepin’ on you” vibes mixed with Arctic Monkeys verbiage. Again imbuing her lover with cult leader status, Savior offers up the sort of images one would expect from a The Shangri-Las, The Marvelettes or The Ronettes song (and then, of course, there are shades of Del Rey’s “Shades of Cool”), boasting, “Pandemonium quivers at his touch/My preacher, my undefined creature/Consumes me.” But who cares so long as that “bad disease” she’s referring to only involves a metaphorical burning in one’s loins?
The uber groovy “But You” is Savior at her most evocative in terms of making the listener fathom her extreme loneliness in the absence of the one she loves (or loved). The best way to conjure this picture is, naturally, with a mattress. More to the point, “the wilted edge of a lonesome mattress” where once her boyfriend used to lay. No more, alas. And the one person who can heal the pain of this wound is the one person who isn’t around to do so. Oh how cruel irony can be in matters of love and all the agony it wreaks (also causing one’s own body to reek from the depression side effect of not washing on the reg).
The denouement that is “The Archer” is as meandering and dreamy as the video itself, featuring Savior roaming aimlessly along the coastline (of Port Townsend, Washington) near a lighthouse that seems useless to her. Not just because it’s the daytime, but because, from a navigational standpoint, there is nowhere she needs to be anymore now that she’s lost the port in the storm that she thought was her true love, the one who “bit [her] head right off with [his] tiny little mouth,” prompting her to “lick the blood from [his] lips.” Indeed, Savior admitted that after some reflection, “At the time, my perception was that I was writing a song about how it feels to love someone, but now when I listen back to ‘The Archer,’ I realize that I was writing an observation of a psychologically unhealthy relationship, from the perspective of someone who is unconsciously aware that she is being emotionally mistreated.” Maybe, in the end, however, if The Archer is any indication, music is both emblematic of the lighthouse and her home. Regardless of living in any (last) shadow (puppet) of certain parties that have worked with her before. Savior is very much her own musician, even if also an amalgam of so many kinds of infinite sadness as previously conveyed by some of her more obviously influencing forebears.
Love her! The dreamy jewel.