Short form is good and Mitstki gets this.

Her last albums covers a lot of ground in little over half an hour. Her motley repertoire channels cameleon-like the spirits of Kate Bush, Tori Amos, Kristin Hersh, Leonard Cohen among others. She salvages humour from the wreckage when life runs aground. Amidst all this there’s an arresting stocking-filler of a track, 1 minute 44 seconds, brief as a reprise, where she seems to perfect her art.

When memories snow
And cover up the driveway
I shovel all those memories
Clear the path to drive to the store
And when memories melt
I hear them in the drainpipe
Drippin’ through the downspout
As I lie awake in the dark

And if I break
Could I go on break?
Be back in my room
Writin’ speeches in my head
Listenin’ to the thousand hands
That clap for me in the dark

Speaking of Cohen, the poet Paul Muldoon cited him as an example of how, in rare cases. music completes poetry. Music also provides a carriage for verse to transverse time and space. “Sound is touch at a distance,” according to psychologist Anne Fernald. When Memories Snow scores on each of these counts.

Mitski’s track has no instrumental build up, her vocals burst in, like the sudden steady snowfall of memories that threaten to derail her day-to-day. She finds some means of clearing them away to carry on with the mundane, but in then in her solitude they morph from solid to sound. The second verse gives way to a riot of percussion, horns and a Japanese reed instrument that swiftly resolve themselves and depart. Discussing the piece, she said that she just “threw everything at it”.

The title of the 2023 album – This Land is Inhospitable and So Are We – could just be a deliberate echo of David Wallace-Wells’s brilliantly devastating book on the environmental crisis, The Uninhabitable Earth, carrying with it the suggestion of the tragi-comic turmoil within her, a microcosm of the turmoil without.