Asher White brings the full catastrophe to her playful pop

"Dozens of distractions whiz by in a typical Asher White song. As she kicks off her latest album, the scattered and enthralling "8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living," that flurry of sound arrives in the form of slot machine beeps and cash register dings. A later song sees White contrast a sledgehammer metal riff with the chintzy clang of a toy piano. She's telling you that anything can transpire on the opaquely titled, seven-minute "Cobalt Room: Good Work / Silver Saab.""

""When I'm feeling stuck with a song, I look around my room, close my eyes and point somewhere, then open and see what I pointed out and try to integrate it into the song," White, 25, tells The Post about "Cobalt Room." "I realized that I was creating these enormous lumbering structures that were swinging, these collapsing pylons, and then I was like, 'What's a piece of tinsel that I can wrap around [it]?"'"

""8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living" captures disasters as they unfold in slow motion. One song sees White watch the cost of living in Providence,where she studied at Rhode Island School of Design, become untenable. The beautiful, hazy "Travel Safe" combines images of her Jewish ancestors' immigration out of Ukraine with her current outrage at Israel, a song that White now feels ambivalent about having written."

Asher White assembles dense, contrasting soundscapes using found noises like slot machine beeps, cash-register dings, toy piano clangs, and heavy metal riffs. The album 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living pairs chaotic arrangements and genre detours—drum-and-bass breaks, warped country melodies, and baroque pop—with moments of unexpected tenderness, including a concluding love song, "Falls." White uses spontaneous room discoveries and improvised objects to puncture large instrumental structures. Lyrical themes include mounting personal instability, gentrification in Providence, ancestral immigration from Ukraine, and ambivalence about incorporating large-scale human tragedies into art.

Read at The Washington Post