Runo Plum has a lot of questions.
“Will the emptiness always be empty?” she wonders on “Gathering The Pieces,” from her debut full-length, Patching. “Will the loneliness always be pending?”
Later, she wants to know, “Will it settle, ever settle down?”
“Is it supposed to feel like this for this long?” is the question that opens “Pond.”
And, less rhetorically, she gently inquires on the record’s penultimate track, “Did you do it on purpose?”
Throughout Patching, the Minneapolis-based Plum turns herself inside out trying to find the answers to the unanswerable problem of heartbreak. There’s the helplessness of “Be Gentle With Me,” a plea she repeats with such yearning it’s clear it will be ignored; there’s the resigned forward motion of “Gathering the Pieces,” because what else is there to do but “get patching”?
Yes, Patching is a heartbreak album, and a damn good one, full of little lines you’ll remember the next time you let a person love you and then crack you wide open. Plum ruminates on how to make love stay and the hard lessons you’ll inevitably learn when you let yourself trust another person, all in a soft, strong voice accompanied by simple guitar melodies.
And yet, while it’s the kind of album made for bed rotting and bemoaning your own relationship sorrows, Patching also feels productive. Plum feels everything so intensely, and she’s a shrewd chronicler of the space between her own actions and feelings. On “Sickness” she’s “going through Kleenex/it’s nothing new” though she confesses that she’s “getting good at distracting” and “ultimately, acting.”
You get the sense that she’s asking the questions because she really wants to find the answers. Maybe she’ll learn something from all the painful introspection; maybe the next one won’t hurt like this.
As Plum tells The Luna Collective, it’s an album where “you can feel the damage, but also the repair.”
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