Silverware

With her sophomore album One True Light, San Francisco-based artist, producer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Ainsley Wagoner takes her long-evolving project Silverware into a new space, one with many rooms but no predictable blueprint. Each of these ten multidimensional songs take their own distinctive path, with Wagoner’s visionist production serving as the connective tissue that makes her experiments with cellophane-wrapped synth pop work alongside subtly jazz-tinged arrangements or make sense interspersed with Friday night shout-along anthems. The stylistic streams change often and drastically, but Wagoner remains at home and locked in airtight focus on whatever sound she approaches. While the music is still ostensibly built around dynamic vocals and a structurally adventurous composition style, there are new levels of both intention and searching here, resulting in an album that shifts effortlessly between textural early morning reflections and sparkling art pop while also acting as a document of vibrant, exponential creative growth.

-Fred Thomas