251. Song No. 3,724: “Gasoline Bride,” Nicole Atkins
Slow Phaser, 2014

Slow Phaser is the Nicole Atkins album I’m least familiar with, a victim of bad timing and never popping up in used-music stores’ inventory and my tendency to gravitate to Good Night Rhonda Lee and Neptune City first when I’m in the mood for this cool-as-fuck Jersey Girl’s music.

Similarly, the Slow Phaser song I’m most likely to play on shamelessly indulgent repeat is “Girl You Look Amazing,” a zippy little David Byrne-adjacent ditty with some pretty excellent lore I’ll get into in, like, seven posts from now (or sometimes this fall, at the rate that building 1:24 VW buses and doing warm-weather things and juggling five magazines’ deadlines all seem to be gobbling up my time and energy since starting the G’s). There’s so many great things eclipsing other also-great things here that it was such a joy to have a well-timed reminder to give this song and its album a couple-three extra-attentive listens (adding a Spotify Car Thing to my life and finally conceding to a this-decade-phone have both admittedly, immediately and surprisingly recast my daily commute as an opportunity for musical deep dives, much to the benefit of spending time with unfairly neglected tunes).

I’ve seen Atkins’ music described as “pop-noir” a couple times now, including by the siren herself; I also read that someone she admired once advised her to “drop the indie bullshit,” nudging along a self-possessed, fully realized shift in tone that really let Atkins get comfortable in a genre-defying authenticity of sound unlike anything anyone else is doing in how expansive, introspective, intimate and explorative it has become, one song always sounding a little different than the next.

The journey her music has gone on has been almost as much of a leveling force as every one of those songs are. Underneath it all, though, there’s always a smidgen of that pop-noir’s titular darkness. Atkins is not afraid to plumb the depths of her worst qualities, or at least the things she’s most critical of, and it makes for full-bodied and wholly lived-in lyrics paired with a melody meticulously matched to that mood. Often, the result is a self-aware wryness and honesty tinged with a darkness not of topic but of the human condition’s less-explored depths and its murkier attributes and impulses.

“Gasoline Bride” is a pretty great example of all that, with its cacophonous revelry playing against lyrical images of having “drowned my demon side in the black water” to create some ominous overtones without resorting to a heavy-handedness that compromises the effectiveness and elegance of execution. It is, like so many of Atkins’ songs, a masterclass in pairing an irresistible melody with decidedly moodier lyrics, an effort that would be jarring or incongruous in a lesser musician’s hands but, here, is a fully realized meditation on the complexity of what it is to exist as a person.