DAUGHTER | His Young Heart EP

By David D. Robbins Jr. | Their Bated Breath
Daughter “His Young Heart” EP

Daughter’s first official release, “His Young Heart” EP, follows the buzz of her four gorgeous demo tracks. The four new songs are just as emotionally giving and complex. On two of the tracks, feelings of love and hate turn with the twist of a verse. “Landfill” is a tell-off song, saying, “Go ahead and leave.” And yet there’s a fissure between love and anger: “This is dangerous / ‘Cuz I want you so much / But I hate your guts / I hate you.” There isn’t a singer out there who cloaks missives like that in a whispery restraint. It speaks volumes to the combination of Tonra’s songwriting and her voice. It’s a voice disarming and quietly fierce. Her dark tones makes each song sound like an intimate disclosure. The clear, treble-heavy consonances raising tiny tempests in a wake of delicately-reverbed vocals. Then there’s the pretty quality of her phrases, “Wait until the snow covers me up / So I cannot move / So I’m just embedded in the frost / Then leave me in the rain / Wait until my clothes cling to my frame.” Self-pity never sounded so poetically sweet.

There are the familiar touchstones of her first recordings in these four songs: mercurial love and hate, secrets, bones, dreams, cold weather and shrouding images like the sea, the woods and forests. Hiding places. Getaways. A young girl’s simultaneous fear and comforting refuge from the world. Tonra’s songs can be so heartbreakingly lonely, her descriptions of outer weather often matching the inner weather of her personal confusions of the heart. Perhaps the strongest song on the record, “Candles”, is mild-blowing and tragic as a fairytale gone wrong. It seems to be about a boy who takes advantage of a young girl’s sexual naivety. Of course, it doesn’t have to be that literal. At the heart of the song is a disconnection between physical closeness and true closeness. The story becomes a lesson, and the song’s protagonist feels vindicated in the knowledge this boy is never going to really be her lover: “Blow out the candles / You’re too old to be so shy, he says to me / So I stay all night / I was just a young heart, confusing in my mind / We’re both in silence / Wide-eyed / Like we’re in a crime scene / Both in silence, wide-eyed / Because we both know I’ll never be your lover / I only bring the heat / Company under cover / Filling space in your sheets.”

There’s a haunting quality to this record, which ends with “Switzerland”, a song that will please fans of Sleep ∞ Over with its narcotized, dreamy, apparition-like drift. The carefully picked acoustics and vocals on “His Young Heart” are also cavernous, which only seems apropos to Daughter’s style. It’s just Tonra and the self-reflecting nature of her music. She allows the reverberation of the guitar strings to fill in the emotive spaces, giving it a breath equal to her own. It’s the spirit of her music, the ethereal and ghostly undercurrents arranged with delicacy around her murmured secrets. “The Woods” is a mastery of mood. Tonra sings of asking St. Christopher (patron saint of long journey’s and storms) to find someone’s lost sister, who went out in the woods. Her vocals glide with an expert’s ease. It’s here we get the gorgeous phrase personifying nature: “And we’re trying to stop the winter / Killin’ all it could.”

Between these four tracks, the four demos, and some of Daughter’s earlier works you can find on YouTube, it’s clear Tonra is gifted with qualities that can’t be taught. Some musicians look on the world with soft eyes. Tonra has the ability to make you feel what she feels. You can’t teach that like you teach a pupil how to play a guitar. She’s a musician who gives honestly of herself with such clarity and peaks of passion. Note: You’ll find her playing at The Slaughtered Lamb in London, U.K. at 7 p.m. on April 20. Read a Their Bated Breath archived post about Daughter’s four earlier demo tracks here. Lyrics are unofficial.