Despite an understated arrival, Mitski’s epically titled seventh album, the Earth is Inhospitable and So Are We, is an instantly relevant and visceral work, deserving to be thoroughly parsed through.
By Bee Roldan
Mitski in the "Bug Like An Angel" music video / photo: Dead Oceans
Mitski is obsessed with the Human Anatomy. The artist has become an allegorical writer post-Be The Cowboy, and seemed to reach her most vague and immaterial with Laurel Hell, a work about that almost erotic fixation we have on the sadness of our haziest memories. What grounded these works is the writing on body parts. Like the menacing “wet teeth, shining eyes” in “Valentine, Texas” or the erotic: “I tuck my hand under my weight,” in “Stay Soft”. Her constant disembodying of these puzzle pieces of the human structure grips the senses and sets up the stark emotionality of her work in the post-modern world. What would happen if she went even more hazy? If her new work took so many departures, but also had so many returns?
The Land is Inhospitable and So are We might be this exact test to her fans' loyalties. Or one that rekindles those who have been around since her folk beginnings. Now hardly concerned with anatomy, she only alludes to what happens to the human body. How it’s contorted, exploited, even “eaten.” Her “bent” or “beaten” form is the topic of many verses here. Genre-wise it is also an almost explicit Folk Rock-treading of the same instrumental-rich work of Bonnie Raitt or The Chicks. In conjunction with the genre, she ditches her personal story, diverting focus on the disembodiment of the natural world from the Human Being(s). In one manner, she reconstructs the myth of Americana in its lyrics, and the lie of the country it is based around; a collection of stolen territories, stolen from humans and other animals. “Buffalo Replaced,” speaks on the literal fading away of a figure: the emotion Hope, who is “blind with no name” and who “shits where she is supposed to feed herself” akin to the loss of the gorgeous brown beast and its supplantation by the Train.
In another way she sparingly scatters throughout her lyrics literal mentions of once-primordial and prevalent wonders like the astral bodies in our sky (beginning “My Love Mine All Mine,” with “Moon, a hole of light”) and how they represent the spiritual pacts between Heaven and Hell, such rare subjects on their own for modern singers. Or fauna of the world: dogs and hounds, the aforementioned buffalo. “The Deal” takes place in the liminal space of a street at night, the idea of heaven imparted through the imagery of the first line: “There’s a deal you can make on a midnight walk alone.” And its context being revealed to us through the “bird perched upon a streetlight,” this pairing of the symbol of a winged being: a messenger from heaven and the natural world, not perched on a tree or ledge but on a man-made lighting device. The world she speaks of in such minimal snapshots, layered underneath the sway and twang of the rock which historically marketed itself as the spirit of this once-wild “country.” See: “The Frost”, the slowest and twangiest thing she’s done in so long, an ode to the same parallelism between the developed world and the land of natural phenomena, two things which exist simultaneously but in spirit battle out.
Streetlights illuminate the road in the "Bug Like An Angel" music video / photo: Dead Oceans
“Star” is one of the tracks in which I would argue you can see this thesis most clearly. There is a divorce of the modern and mechanical, emulated by her trademark long cosmic-sounding synths— and the infinite beauty of the natural world around us— with the faux-return to analog with the folk-rock instruments on the tracks before this one. Its beginning brings to mind the work of Hans Zimmer, one of the only artists who has managed to bottle the sound of space and rocket engines and broken bones inside of the milky way galaxy.
The ridiculously gorgeous sonic crux of this album is the track that follows: “I’m Your Man.” This penultimate track is also where the allusions to journeys and pacts between the devil and falls from the heavens come to be realized. She suddenly reveals what this vague journey could be about. It’s as if this entire time she has shifted from singing from the perspective of a human to the incarnation of the Earth. We recall when she asks in “My Love Mine All Mine” for the Moon to shine its light down on her baby “when it comes to be my turn”, who showed her “what my heart was worth.” The not so obvious conclusion when in the second to last chapter she begins with the fascinating dichotomy: “You’re an angel, I’m a dog / Or you’re a dog, and I’m your man,” being that throughout Mitski has challenged our notions of the omniscient narrator and American folk hero and oscillated between the archetypal Human experiencing Earth and the very consciousness of Earth. Relying on our assumptions of her previous work she leads us into the psyche of the planet, narrowly avoiding obvious cliches but carving out the relief of an ancient relationship perverted: the steward of the World, Man, (gendering of this by Mitski, furthering her point about the exploitation of the Earth) watching both inside and from afar, as they are further divorced from the death of their Mother. Her final lines are mixed into the sounds of humans speaking and barking dogs, bringing into mind the near-mythical trick of Fiona Apple at the end of the titular track of Fetch the Bolt Cutters. This time the dogs are symbols not of the wild and untameable force of a woman, but the primordial “hounds” of hell coming to bring judgement. Mitski’s sick humor being that the Earth feels as though she will go first: “one day you’ll figure me out/ I’ll meet judgement by the hounds.”
As if Gaea, as powerful as she is, is a strange bounded mother who knows the limits of her reach, unlike the contradictory children she now prays for. This being the critical realization: how could we learn to love each other enough to create and preserve space for each other regardless of the cataclysmic pasts we have behind us and the grotesque futures we continue to weave. How could we do this so that we could heal the mother that even in her ailing life, asks for light to reach us, we who think we could one day reach this same light, forgetting how we were so privileged to dream of this in the first place.
Still from "My Love All Mine" music video / photo: Dead Oceans
In her final track, a gothic and almost sinister sounding track reminiscent of Florence and the Machine in its reverbed pianos, and murky sounding tambourine ringing from afar, she settles back into Human flesh. “Brushing my hair naked/ spritz my face with toner,” the vanity of the individual human in the face of an intense and primordial conflict. But also the pathetic ease of this mindset. Where others would finish with the almost hopeful sound of the penultimate track, Mitski leaves us with the awful sense of dread. She allows us to see what my partner said the other night: an act of such intense “selflessness,” forgetting her own body to take us along the same perilous journey that has kept her awake at night. The result: a work of art invested in witnessing for us and with us, that which we cannot bear on our own.
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