Tiny Vipers - American Prayer

On December 2, when I saw the new, surprise Tiny Vipers EP "American Prayer" pop up in my Bandcamp feed, I had a full body visceral reaction, like whatever the exact opposite of a panic attack is. I was alone, but I instinctively looked around the room, wanting to announce to someone that Jesy Fortino had just put out new music and everyone in the world needed to stop what they're doing and recognize the gravity of this occurrence.

Tiny Vipers' 2009 album "Life on Earth" is one of the most intricately woven folk albums of the 21st century. It's sparse in its sound, though Fortino's achingly human voice, aided by her confessional lyrics, manages to fill up all the space left over by her minimalist guitar playing, giving the album an atmosphere that is as warm as it is suffocating. Since then, she's put out an excellent collaboration with Grouper called "Mirroring" along with some more ambient and electronic work, but nothing that returned to the territory she mined with "Life on Earth."

And then these three songs dropped out of nowhere, 13 years later.

Picking up where you left off over a decade later as an artist is, inherently, a challenge. You'll be in a different place, at a different age, perhaps in a whole different headspace. And yet Tiny Vipers managed to take the whispering, melancholy essence of "Life on Earth" and distill it into three perfect songs on "American Prayer." Her voice remains her most foundational instrument, as it hovers above languid arpeggios on her guitar. The lyrics simultaneously feel deeply personal to the point of opacity while her delivery imbues them with a kind of affective universalism, conveying the broad humanity in each of the particular stories she tells. "American Prayer" is, despite its short length, easily one of the most crucial pieces of music I've heard in years.

If Tiny Vipers is going to make us wait so long in between albums, and then only give us three songs, I suppose we're lucky that she is almost supernaturally good at her craft. Fortino is, from my vantage point, probably the best working singer-songwriter in this genre, and if we only get something from her once a decade, so be it. How can you possibly complain about waiting for something so brilliant?