Thelma: The Only Thing (Self Released)

The Only Thing starts out a little stir-crazy, its synths pacing in steady circles. Thelma twirls, an enchantress entrapped by her own magic. Her voice tendrils and surges around her, Mitski vibrato contorting into Moaning Myrtle yips and post-cry hups. But as brashly as it can thrash, her voice always collapses, composing itself into easy ribbons. (Embodying the forced restraint of Never Complain — how those in pain are so often shamed out of complaining (speaking truthfully) for the sake of assuaging others.)

Thelma watches the endless ways bodies can rupture the tenuous — by being too real, “warm guts / black lungs,” or too distant. She spies on elusive lovers from behind hedges, their eyes just crooked enough to make them seem authentic. One, Stephen, makes her guess his name. She asks another if she can call him Orlando, which ends up being a lonely whisper. Her own body’s calling, her chronic soft tissue pain, forces immediate vulnerability, sharpening how oblong fullness, our “truest face,” can make us feel too cumbersome to ever be holdable.

But her reality also means that Thelma can shapeshift into empathetic omniscience. In Solitaire, she considers the film negative of Mitski’s Two Slow Dancers: they ended up together, but they hardly sing. The wife, blinded by silent pain, overcooks dinner, her only stumbling reprieve a chair, a green game of solitaire. Sway is a twilight respite, “a hole in the porch” to giggle and hide in, to wait out the thunder. A trumpet inhales. “Oh how I’ll sway,” she wafts, as her “body slips away.”

Thelma’s voice goes where no body can, which is everywhere. Even as her “body will remind me No Dancing Allowed,” she will find loopholes in her own hair knots. She will sing, “No Dancing, No Dancing,” as her voice does the slow dancing, the cello and drums definitely less than an arm’s length apart. If “pain is an island with a cabaret law,” The Only Thing is the speakeasy where the password is “hurt,” where refills of time are served in sloshing pitchers. Where bodies are never behind, and we can dance and dance, limbless at last. (4/5)