Izzy True's Weeping Insecurity
By Nathaniel Ross
A lot of people take indie rock tropes for granted these days. Deliberately out-of-tune performance, sloppy guitar playing, singing that’s more like a tuneful whisper—all these decades-old fixtures are either subsumed as meaningless signifiers of the dominant DIY aesthetic or derided as tired cliches.
I admit, when I first heard Izzy True, I was thoroughly in that second category. I was at a show in the back of a tiny record store in Kingston, NY, surrounded by two dozen pale bespectacled teenagers and mildly turned off by the lead singer’s self-effacing patter. But after giving Izzy True’s Troll EP a listen at home, I realized that she has a gift: an ability to transform tired tropes from inert genre markers into highly meaningful qualities that contribute to each song’s singular affect.
The EP has since become my favorite thing I’ve heard all year. I highly advise giving the whole thing a listen, but I’m going to zero in on track 2, “Cake”, which most fully embodies these attributes, in this case to portray an overwhelming sense of weeping insecurity.
Go ahead, give it a listen.
The track begins with a slow, languid drum groove punctuated painfully by a cowbell on the occasional upbeat. Izzy’s clean guitar, drenched in a depressive chorus, enters with a four-chord sequence with a descending melody. Already we have a pretty morose, though not lifeless, soundscape to work with.
Then the vocals enter, the singer’s mumbling only contributing to the mysteriousness of the lyrics. It’s hard to ascertain any sort of narrative, but I don’t think the lyrics’ effectiveness is dependent on the listener’s understanding in any literal sense. The verses, as per the song’s title, allude to cake-making, but obliquely: “Oh my sweet thing/Milky trembling,” Izzy sings in the first lines, whispering sweet nothings to her terrified virgin batter. In verse two, she flips an idiom on its head: “Grab a cold bowl/Greasy elbow,” she says, showing us that what we thought was admirable (elbow grease) actually might be pretty gross. The verses thus present an elusively foul sensuality that turns the literal sense of the song on its head.
This lyrical weirdness, when combined with Izzy’s careful melodic choices, contributes to a profound sense of instability. Although the verse introduces a steady pulse of 8th notes, the forward momentum they bring is tempered by the tentative vocal delivery, making the verse’s newfound energy more anxious than excited. Each verse is made up of two phrases of three lines each. The first two lines of each phrase rise, melodically speaking, forming what a music theorist might call an antecedent. Antecedents are associated with a sense of tension that is released with the consequent. The problem is that the consequent never really arrives. After the rising melody of the first two lines, we expect the third line to fall in turn, but it doesn’t. When Izzy sings “Here am I, still waiting,” the word “waiting” falls on the seventh degree of a major seventh chord. The major seventh chord is dissonant enough that even pre-1940 jazz musicians avoided it thoroughly, due to a distaste for the interval of a semitone between the seventh and the root of the chord. It is precisely this semitone that Izzy exploits here. She sings “waiting” a semitone below the expected root note, resulting in a melody that never truly resolves and feels marvelously unbalanced. If only she would rise to the root! But alas, we are left waiting forever.
To see what I mean, check out these examples: The first is an approximation of what we hear on the recording. The phrase ends shakily, on the major seventh of the final chord. Listen to the example here.
In the original, there is no release of tension traditionally associated with a consequent phrase.
Next is what we would hear if Izzy finished the phrase traditionally, on the tonic of the final chord. Here, the last note is one semitone higher than in the recording. Listen here.
With one small note change, tension is released in what sounds more like a traditional consequent phrase.
It's clear that in the second, hypothetical example, there is a sense of finality that the original recording lacks. It is this lack of finality that makes the verse sound so unstable.
This effect only intensifies in the chorus, which is arranged in a quiet-loud-quiet-loud form. “Dreamy dreamy dream,” she heaves, her pitch not quite fluctuating, her voice straining against itself in its low register. The guitar becomes more syncopated, increasing the anxious energy. “Beamy beam beam,” she pleads, and we hear the subtle genius that makes Izzy True’s music so damn effective. On the last “beam” her voice breaks free of the melodic trap she had set for it, rising and then falling a semitone, the same semitone used to such effect in the verse. What makes this particular instance so remarkable is that it sounds like an accident, hardly any different from the ordinary wavering in pitch that characterises her lachrymose delivery. We hardly notice it, making it all the more powerful.
We approach the loud part of the chorus, which solidifies the more forceful teary-eyed delivery suggested by the song’s previous sung whisper: “What’s a love machine?/I don’t have one, have one.” Izzy’s lack of a love machine is clearly traumatic, and we feel her pain as her deft imprecision combines with a vocal that, despite its strength, is carefully contained from breaking into a scream.
Of course, it’s not just these vocal subtleties that make this song so insecure. The guitar is often slightly out of tune, you can hear mistakes every so often, and the clean guitar tone, despite the chorus effect, feels painfully exposed. But it’s these elements in combination with her idiosyncratic vocals that give us this cohesive, tearfully anxious whole.
Next time I bake a cake, you will find my tears in the batter.