Free Range – Practice (2023)
Review:
Sofia Jensen is singing about you. Probably not you, but “you,” as in the subject pronoun, present on all 10 songs of Practice, the debut album from Jensen’s indie-folk project Free Range. Jensen is an 18-year-old songwriter venturing into warmly lit acoustic territory after spending their adolescence exploring the electric guitar and fronting a rock band. With Free Range, they’ve created an outlet for looking inward, a space to reflect and digest after closing the book on childhood. When they take inventory of everything that’s changing around them, it’s enough to start furiously purging thoughts through the pen, but for Jensen—whether the subject is a friend, a family member, a former or present partner, or anything in between—there is no sufficient self-reflection without a whole lot of “you.” There’s a real sun-setting-on-summer picture that comes into focus as Practice unfurls. Jensen sounds like the high school graduate who didn’t graduate so much as survive, with joviality all but flattened and self-assurance just starting to crystallize. The shift from electric to acoustic makes sense for a songwriter who also seems to be discovering that it’s easier to find footing in peace and quiet: “I asked if we could go up to the countryside/Where I could feel time,” Jensen sings on “Free Range,” a slowly ascending mountain hike of a song that exemplifies the band’s innately unrushed disposition. On Practice, bassist Bailey Minzenberger and drummer and producer Jack Henry handle Jensen’s fragile compositions with appropriately gentle hands, keeping to a softwood framework built from snare brushes and acoustic chords that wouldn’t translate any worse in a living room than on a stage. Jensen’s voice stays in a mid-range octave with a slightly wounded creakiness. When the band finds its own character, as they do on “Free Range” and the slide-guitar-touched opener “Want to Know,” an alchemy occurs that emboldens Jensen, their openness inspiring the supporting players to open their own doors as well. But when the arrangements are more formulaic, such as on the rocking-chair-like “For Me to Find,” Jensen seems timid, as if passing the day beneath a comfortable security blanket of folky sounds. Although they don’t often feel particularly complex or ambitious, the song structures tend to serve as soft, functional landing pads for the soul-baring lyrics. They tie together Jensen’s abundant internal monologues and dialogues as a neutral rug might a colorful room. One tune in particular stands clearly above the field. “Growing Away,” which was fittingly the last track that Jensen wrote for the album, is a fine-tuned breakthrough from start to finish, the type of song where you can hear the level-up as it’s happening. Jensen gets as real as ever, reflecting on getting sober and embracing lucidity through the pain of atrophy. The band lifts and illuminates them with precise readings, pulling back at just the right moments to shine more light on the best lines and a perfectly placed electric guitar solo. Every melodic turn is unexpected yet faithful, every rhyme clever without sacrificing sincerity, no crack in Jensen’s voice gratuitous, no harmony unproductive. For Jensen, 90 percent of growing up might be learning how to let go, but if the other 10 percent feels like this, then bring it on. — by Steven Arroyo on pitchfork.com
Track List:
01 - Want to Know
02 - On Occasion
03 - Keep in Time
04 - For Me to Find
05 - Forgotten
06 - Growing Away
07 - All My Thoughts
08 - Free Range
09 - Running Out
10 - Traveling Show
Media Report:
Genre: indie-folk
Country: Chicago, Illinois, USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)
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