I am sitting in a forest inside a botanic garden, where everything is in bloom. the last of summer lies ahead. today, the greenhouses were open to the public and all the flower beds seem to glisten, bathing in the glow of sugar water.

Sugar water is Maude Latour’s debut album. she’s airy, pop rising, floating light among mere mortals. and then it occurs to me that late August captures the precise seasonality of the album. very well. very well indeed. i think the language of the album is this. sugar water marks the end of the summer as the end of the world.

'I had a vision of the north star.'

The starting line of a song (track 9). i can’t help but feel a fever for Perseid’s meteor showers, how my friends used to go to this hill in arlington in August to watch the stars peel off the sky, shooting fire, and don’t blink or you’ll miss it. and i do miss it. the north star is the backdrop to a little ditty called cosmic superstar girl on sugar water’s back half. it flies under the radar, but could be the one to end us all, the slyest of comets.

'You are a party, you are a wave, you are a magical skateboard rider, you are a rave.'

Bloom is the last song (track 12). buddhist or not, the effect of listening is circular, as party revolves back to rave. the song is ridiculous although it’s not. for everything must run its course, so do listen twice. in death, love is displaced– transformed, never created nor destroyed. the love that once existed persists in a new form, and then… you bloom. in the last segment of the project, Maude puts forth this call to action. so, we bloom.

And so we wilt. Maude’s bird’s eye approach is balanced, so there are moments in the record where she’s telling me i’m already dead. so i’m dying, i’m dead, and i’m entering the whirpool (track 4), going down the drain, losening my grip. Maude is having me skate rock bottom.

But then again, you gotta die to to be born. our minds are sinking ships amongst waves and pathways and scripture and in the beds of gleaming flowers, and did you happen to notice the infinite roses in our field of vision (track 11)? my brain breaks it all down: sugar water is code for late august and its fragile saturation. maximal life energy bursting its container. she follows through on her concepts, to the effect that the throughline is kaleidoscopically fatal.

'You are the last dance, and baby you're god'

She’s praising nature’s perfect math and beauty everywhere you look. inside the botanic garden and everything blooms. i am enveloped, the spirals of golden ratios splitting seams inside the shape of tree leaves. repeating themselves on fractal scales. resembling a pattern that dissolves as soon as it coheres. a pattern so sweet, that even pain illuminates. she’s saying, i’ll get you high on sugar water: it’s not what i expect of a debut pop record but i will surely embrace it. August, you’ve found your soundwave.

( Tough cookie critics have, in the past, challenged Maude’s use of a Lorde-like style of singing and lyric writing that can veer closer to clumsiness than specifity (example: ‘cause im slipping through the cracks of the floorboards to the apartment below us, yeah’). with this latest entry, does she push beyond the confines and into a league of her own? she claims existential pop, which i find fitting. it’s fitting that her poptimism is charting in August, a project of hundreds of songs thoughtfully filtered down to 12. )

Songs:

• Bloom by maude latour
• Time to pretend by mgmt
• Tokyo drifting by glass animals

(August-approved indie sleaze)