“Fuck around and find out,” Angela Autumn implores on “In the South” off her new album Believer. But contrary to the sentiment, it isn’t an invitation to a brawl. It is coy and intriguing, an introduction to Autumn’s beguiling warble and the world she creates on Believer, one with plenty of room to be messy and, quite literally, fuck around and find out. As she plays and experiments with genre, treating pop and Appalachian folk and grungy guitar rock all with the same reverence, a new kind of sonic landscape appears on the horizon, one without strict parameters for the ways a banjo might coexist with synth or electric guitar or orchestral strings.
Autumn’s textural arrangements make Believer feel fearlessly expansive. Cello builds a dramatic peak on the soft closer “My Alchemy,” a wiggle of guitar forms an ominous psychedelic cloud over “Heavy Tobacco,” fiddle lends warmth to the cynical “Millionaire Money,” and a throbbing bass line on the album’s stellar headbanger of a title track practically possesses you on the dancefloor. Unexpected electric guitar and banjo riffs drive “I Don’t Think About You At All” and “Electric Lizard” into a whole new dimension of catchy, commanding almost compulsive repeat listens, and the hypnotic “Jesus Heist” uses layered vocals like a bewitching incantation.
