CHARLOTTE CORNFIELD - High In The Minuses LP (Blue Jay Vinyl)

Label: Polyvinyl

When the world shut down in March 2020, Charlotte Cornfield was in the middle of an artist residency in the Rocky Mountains, hunkered down in a hut with a baby grand piano, sketching ideas for a followup album to her Polaris-Longlisted 2019 LP The Shape of Your Name. In a matter of hours, she found herself back home in Toronto with months of touring cancelled and a wide swath of time ahead of her. She began to write feverishly, mining her memories and dreams and recounting them with vivid detail.

The result is Highs in the Minuses, a memoir in fragments. Here Cornfield fully embraces the role of narrator, moving from one vignette to another in a colorful collage.

The brutal honesty in her lyrics brings to mind writers like David Berman and Adrianne Lenker, while musically she conjures a Zuma-era Neil Young, leaping from crunchy guitar rock to piano ballads with effortless grace. Highs in the Minuses is Charlotte Cornfield's strongest offering to date, each song a gem in and of itself.