(Sadcore / Indie Rock) S - Cool Choices - 2014, MP3, 128-320 kbps

Jenn Ghetto (real name Jennifer Hays) is a singer-songwriter and guitarist who performs under the name S. She was a member of the now defunct band Carissa's Wierd. Her songs are usually recorded in her bedroom and feature only vocals and guitar.

As a former member of the now-defunct Seattle band Carissa’s Wierd, Jenn Ghetto understands the science of bittersweet confession. She writes psychologically acute breakup stories that show what it means to hurt, but her songs aren’t about pretending to make the right decisions—they’re about telling the truth.
Producer Chris Walla recorded her new album, Cool Choices, and he has a lot to do with its approachability. Ghetto worked with him back when she was still making achy, acoustic slowcore as part of Carissa’s Wierd. That group disbanded after releasing their third album, Songs About Leaving, in 2003, at which point Ben Bridwell and Mat Brooke went on to form Band of Horses, Sera Cahoone went solo, and Mat Brooke went on to Grand Archives. Ghetto quietly released records as S, most of them sad bedroom confessionals recorded on a four-track.
Cool Choices’ narrative style is familiar: Ghetto’s last records as S were called Sadstyle, Puking and Crying, and I’m Not as Good at It as You; previous songs had titles like “Pathetic”, “Crushed”, and “Outro (The Agony)”. From here, opening the first line on her latest record with “This is how losers feel/ I am a loser” seems like a natural thematic progression. A blithe melancholy subsumes the entirety of this record, which is also her most accessible record to date.
“Like GangBusters” is a jangly, propulsive ballad the lineage of Tegan and Sara’s “Dark Come Soon”—a comparison that I’m wary of making, if only because Walla also produced that track. The harmonies are similarly clean—sharp arpeggios and barrel drumming drive it’s melodies— and Ghetto’s declarations of “you will not take me down” are measured like they wouldn’t feel out of place on The Con. The effect here and throughout Cool Choices is that Jenn Ghetto sounds more like Jenn Ghetto— Walla lends the record a familiar warmth, and better production highlights lyrical gems like “I’m crazy and you’re fucked up” whenever they occur.
Ghetto typically writes with a balance of wry humor and sad yearning, but Cool Choices feels like a maturation in terms of delivery. Her voice luxuriates over Walla’s blended instrumentals with such command that you might forget how broken the lyrics really are. “It’s so hard to see you around here every day” and “I know about the girl you fucked” are words that Ghetto murmurs in the span of the same hook. Elsewhere her voice grows more assertive-—“You never did any of that/ You never said any of those things/ You never even called me back”—as if she’s finally owning a resentment that her whisper-croon could barely relay.
The difficulty surrounding Ghetto's vocal delivery— a sort of stylized numbness—is that when the hooks don’t catch, or when the instrumentation isn’t interesting enough, the songs are easy to forget. The second half of Cool Choices can’t match the first in quality or intrigue, but what makes the album as a whole worth listening to is Ghetto’s ability to burrow into a quarry of sentimental abandon and talk about what it feels like to be vulnerable. Whenever her lyrics are twee or oblique— as with the empty phrasing on “Forever Love”—that sense of intimacy is lost. The record’s higher points—“Brunch”, “Loser”, “Vampires”— stay much closer to the chest. Cool Choices succeeds when it feels like introspection, and that should always be enough.