Ruth Garbus makes Profound light enough to float and strange enough to stay

Ruth Garbus’ Profound is reviewed on 16 June, and the album seems to do the rare thing its title risks promising: finding depth without becoming heavy-handed. Pitchfork frames the record as surreal, beautifully austere and unusually light in mood, which sounds like exactly the territory Garbus knows how to make her own. Her songs can feel tiny at first glance, but the details open strangely: aging, mortality, fairground memories, love, illness, flowers and the mundane little flashes that make life suddenly visible. Compared with more dramatic singer-songwriter records, Profound appears less interested in grand confession than in lucid observation. That is a strong artistic choice. Sometimes the most moving songs are not the ones that announce pain in capital letters. They are the ones that notice a wrinkle, a weather change, a small good thing, and let the whole universe lean in.

Source: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ruth-garbus-profound/