Graceful — Touch Girl Apple Blossom
Graceful — Touch Girl Apple Blossom
Austin-based twee-pop band Touch Girl Apple Blossom recently followed up their 2023 debut— an EP appropriately titled “EP”— with a fully-bloomed project: Graceful, released May 15 via perennial. In its scattered, narrative-based fervor, the project’s 10 tracks scale a lucid tale of heartbreak, battered love, and reconciliation— a markedly ambitious, yet unmistakably modest, turn.
The album opens with the flanged, elastic riffs of “Tell”. Complemented by the impassive, layered vocal delivery of lead singer Olivia Garner, the track establishes our scene— saccharine like an early June dawn— as Garner etches out triplets of swelling sentiment best exemplified by the album’s opening lines: “Make enough to eat / The most important thing / I still have the same dreams.”
The band then settles into its niche with the album’s final lead single, “The Springtime Reminds Me Of…”. The first traditional pop track of the record, it takes on the same bare-armed flange of “Tell” but with a distinct and rambling alt-country tone, only to be countered by a turning of the dial on “Vacation”. As much as the track, which runs just over two-and-a-half minutes, aligns itself closely with the sun-tinged pop of the rest of the project, “Vacation”, more than any other song on the record, also bears the band’s shoegaze leanings on its sleeve in the wash of its crashing drum fills and sailing vocals.
“You Made Me Do It” then represents the final turn of the first segment of the album, diving into a softer tone of self-denial and absolution while reflecting, in its modest mood, on the previous tracks’ enumerations of the collapsing sensations of a fading romantic relationship.
“Moon Was Gone”, in bringing bassist and vocalist Dustin Pilkington to the foreground for the first time, also brings the album’s two characters into focus. While the record settles primarily on the character projected by Garner, Pilkington provides the other perspective— one of shame-faced and guilt-ridden inaction— as he sings, “Cause I’m broken, yeah I feel undone / I am broken, I’m the only one to blame /Anyone can see I’m taking my time / Stringing it along.”
“Heart-Go” takes the transfer of momentum that was established on “Moon Was Gone”, however, and flips it on its head. We return right back to Garner, who splatters much of the last track’s sentiment, albeit through a mellower medium, across a low-end swatched canvas.
“Dustin’s Song” carries these themes to their bitter extremes, but “Back’N’Forth”, in its ripping pop structure reminiscent of The Beatles’ discretions on Help!, reverses these intentions. Our couple is reconciling, and the project’s dual conclusion— “I’m Lucky I Found You” and “Big Star Shinin’”— insofar as they duck the love-sickness of the earlier portions of the album, bring us to a tactful, if tentative, culmination of the album’s narrative themes.
None of the tracks on Graceful are monumental in and of themselves. But in their totality, they establish an almost irresistible bittersweetness, one that takes the usual strictures of twee-pop, its rubber-band riffs and poetically concise lyrics, and injects them with crushing rhythms and a deep self-awareness of the genre’s own boundaries. It never stretches too far outside of itself, but when it does, it quickly snaps back to its sonic center of gravity— an admirable and controlled effort for the Austin four-piece’s full-length debut.