The songs on Decide Which Way The Eyes Are Looking, Lina Tullgren’s new album, seem to come together in real-time. Tullgren’s elliptical melodies and understated delivery are pitched somewhere between early draft and final product, like they have been caught in the first flush of inspiration. Horns and brass are strewn throughout, often fitting themselves almost tentatively around the sleepy, tumbling songs. At the end of ‘Poem’, you hear a voice – Tullgren’s? – saying “yeah, that was great”.
To record Decide Which Way The Eyes Are Looking, Tullgren invited a range of Los Angeles-based musicians to “Jonny Kosmo’s backhouse”, which functioned “as a cozy, easygoing space for the players to create their parts together”. This approach to making an album – simply putting creative people in the same room to augment a songwriter’s material – seems less common in the twenty-first century (understandably, due to cost and logistics), but here it has paid dividends.
The liner notes for this album detail a long list of players and instruments, including Luke Csehak on euphonium, cello, trumpet, and soprano saxophone, Leng Bian on harp, and Michael Sachs on clarinet and flute. This approach could risk over-saturation, a too-many-cooks situation, but Tullgren expertly marshalls each member of the ensemble. This is still a sparse and intimate album. ‘Shedding Shedding’ recalls the closing minutes of Sunn O)))’s ‘Alice’, which opens up entropically, where muted horns, harp, and flute orbit Tullgren’s gently plucked guitar. On ‘Something New All Day’, the tail of the guitar notes blend with the saxophone; it’s as if a new instrument is created, one of metal, reed, and wood. Each of the instruments on Decide Which Way The Eyes Are Looking seem to have been selected for their timbre as much as their sound: the pluck of the harp, the saxophone’s accompanying rush of air, the click of the players’ fingers on trumpet valves.
Tullgren’s voice and steadily-plucked guitar are the only real constants in Decide Which Way The Eyes Are Looking. Tullgren “took the quiet isolation of a shoreline cabin” to first write this album, with many of the lyrics relating to the simple ability to notice – see “it walks by my window”, or “I have beautiful hands and I’m a singer”, or “I hear a car horn” – that is heightened in isolation. These songs have been written and played by Tullgren, for Tullgren. The disparity between the rich session instrumentation and Tullgren’s soft, lilting voice is never an issue, with the former seeming only to foreground the intimacy of the latter. Tullgren is known for the sparseness of their music – telling BOMB magazine in 2020 that, on dates during a recent European tour, they “addressed the crowd about their talking.” With the occasional artful bum note or intake of breath, it’s as if we’re sitting near them on a squashy armchair in Jonny’s Kosmo’s backhouse.
‘Do You Know What I Mean’ is the closing song on Decide Which Way The Eyes Are Looking. It is the first on the album to feature only Tullgren’s voice and guitar, and the lack of euphonium, saxophone, cello, or trumpet suggests the last thirty-one minutes have been a dream, like Tullgren has imagined up the layers of instrumentation that garland this magical record, sitting alone in the cabin. ‘Do You Know What I Mean’ is the sound of an album slowly waking after a strange, dream-filled sleep.
