Julia Holter - Loud City Song 2LP

"There's a flavor to the sound of walking no one ever noticed before," Julia Holter sings at one point on her third album, Loud City Song, and if anyone could notice that, it would be her. Holter excels at bringing emotional depth to her high-concept music and never more so than on this set of songs, which feels as ambitious as Tragedy and Ekstasis, but more down to earth. This may be her most accessible work yet, perhaps because of its relatively contemporary setting: drawing from Colette's 1944 novella Gigi (as well as the 1958 musical film it inspired), Loud City Song explores the city, celebrity, the individual, and love in fin de siècle Paris and 21st century Los Angeles, blurring them together in ways that get at more universal truths. In Gigi's time or Holter's, there are people who love spectacle, celebrity, and gossip, and Holter examines this brilliantly in the two-part "Maxim's." Named for the famed Parisian restaurant, the first part fades in like a glittering mirage coming