ALBUM REVIEW: Cinder Well’s Austere ‘A Blooming Body’ Finds Fascination in the Everyday

Amelia Baker delivers her austere songs with the sober bearing of someone imparting fateful news. For a decade the California native, who records as Cinder Well, has excelled at an unadorned brand of folk that rewards full attention, performing spare tunes in a gently commanding voice. Teasing deeper meanings from small pieces of everyday life, A Blooming Body is transfixing and vaguely unsettling at once.

Baker spent extensive time honing her craft in Ireland, underscoring a shared DNA with the country’s traditional sounds. A Blooming Body, however, rejects any notion of nostalgia, subtly supporting her forthright voice and acoustic guitar with inventive arrangements and a colorful array of instruments, from e-bow, synth, and sampler to sax, tuba, and clarinet. 

Her memorable vignettes capture the mundane thoughts and actions of so-called ordinary folks, suggesting there’s actually nothing ordinary about the vivid inner lives of others. The ominous “While the Womb Screams Silently” opens the album by examining the clash between personal desires and society’s limits, wondering how someone “tied up in patriarchal dreams” can find fulfillment, only to note glumly, “At some point we just stop.” Sweet and sad, “Beyond the Pale” surveys the aftermath of a lover’s quarrel, with the singer revealing, “I spent the morning / Listing all the different ways that I have wronged you,” and “craving a conversation” with strangers in a coffeeshop. Drawing on dramatic viola and flugelhorn, “Ashes” continues the search for connection and celebrates the humble comforts of home, concluding amiably, “I look forward to kick off my slippers / Lower myself into clean bedsheets / And to waking up in the morning / To the birds looking for seed.”