Helen Ballentine's spellbinding first full-length album Quiet the Room
is the sound of a window opening, a barrier dissolving. Across these
fourteen tracks, the outside world seeps in and the inside world crawls
out. The result is a stunning and quietly moving work that reflects the
journeys we take through the physical and spiritual realms of ourselves in
order to show up for the world.
While writing the album in the summer of 2021, Ballentine drew
inspiration from her childhood home in Mount Vernon, NY. What she set
out to capture on Quiet the Room was not the innocence of childhood,
as it is so often portrayed, but the intense complexity of it. Past and
present merge Escher-like in this dreamlike space laced with elements
of fantasy, magic, and mystery. Musically, this translates into a sound that
feels somehow weighty and ephemeral all at once, like a time lapse of
copper corroding.
To capture the effortless blend of electronic, ambient, folk, and rock,
Ballentine and her partner and collaborator Noah Weinman brought in
producer Andrew Sarlo to record at Chicken Shack studio in Upstate New
York, close to where Ballentine grew up. "We wanted every song to have
that little twinkle, but also a sense of crumbling," she says. These songs
thrum with moments of anxiety that boil over into moments of peace,
as on lead single "Whatever Fits Together," which chugs to a ragged
start before the gears catch and ease. On "It's Like a Secret," Ballentine
struggles to connect and let people in, recognizing that no one can ever
fully know our inner worlds and that to understand each other is to cross
a barrier and leave a part of ourselves behind. And yet, on closing track
"You are my House," she finds a way to reach out. "You are the walls and
floors of my room," she sings in perfect, hopeful harmony.
As the album cover invites, these are dollhouse songs to which we bend
a giant eye, peering into the laminate, luminous world that Ballentine has
created. Like a kid constructing a shelter in a patch of sharp brambles,
she reminds us that beauty and terror can exist in the same place.
The complexities of childhood are so often overlooked, but through
these private yet generous songs, she gives new weight to our earliest
memories, widening the frame for us-even opening a window.
