A ghost moves through Rift. Despite Clara Mann explicitly singing, “I’m still strung out on your ghost” in “Stadiums”, pinpointing the ghost upon a former lover would be missing the broader point: it symbolises the past. Therefore, the past is the phantom that seeps into every nook and cranny of Rift. Even with all the driving (that comprises much of the album’s imagery), spectral shadows trail behind. Essentially, Rift is a car journey on the road to self-discovery, culminating in the narrator finding an inner freedom that no endless highway could provide.
The UK-based multi-disciplinary artist Mann released her first EP, Consolations, in 2021, followed by her second EP, Stay Open, in 2022. Raised in the south of France, Mann is influenced by Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel, who can be detected in her emotive delivery. After returning to England with her family, Mann focused on songwriting. Many of her songs begin life as drawings, which, with their impressionistic quality, should not surprise listeners.
With the likes of Daisy Rickman, Juni Habel, and Germaine Dunes, it is a fruitful time for female contemporary folk artists. Undoubtedly, Clara Mann is influenced by an older generation of singer-songwriters: Molly Drake, Judee Sill, Bridget St John, and Iris Dement. These are some of the cultural touchstones you will hear in Mann’s music—but they don’t capture the full scope of her artistry. Firstly, there is her detailed writing; secondly, her lithe voice.
Mann’s music makes you feel as if years—even a lifetime—have elapsed in a three-minute track. Moreover, her songs play out like memories, a mix of clarity and nebulosity. They rush back to you in finer details, before gradually retreating, as if a tracking shot pulling away from the subject and, instead, captures the mise-en-scène: rain-soaked roads, empty skies, crimson sunrises, and sleepy suburbs. Put differently, Mann is a writer of scenery, not action.
The opening number, “It Only Hurts”, showcases the subtle feyness of Clara Mann’s quivering voice. With delicate, acoustic guitar fingerpicking, and string squeaks (which there are lots of on Rift), “It Only Hurts” captures the rough-hewn production of the album. Resignedly, the narrator reveals she only hurts when she wakes and fades away—in other words, constantly. In “It Only Hurts”, sorrow mixes with beauty in ways that can only belong to the young, not due to a lack of maturity or depth but in its unsparing fatalism.
The second track, “Til Come Around”, painstakingly describes a couple appearing to one another as strangers. Their intimacy only reinforces their growing apart. Matter-of-factly, Mann sings, “Your love is a means to an end,” bolstered by a bass drum, a snare shuffle, and an unadorned piano. It is an unsettling lullaby that sweeps you along for a turbulent, psychological portrayal of a couple, not to mention the violent imagery.
Like most of Rift, “Driving Home the Long Way” finds a narrator exploring the past through a car journey, only missing the former days when on long drives home with her partner. Over a chugging acoustic guitar, “Driving Home the Long Way” is starkly stunning, with Clara Mann producing a Joan Baez-like vibrato. The key motif of Rift is the passage of time; by the end, Mann, with a curtness, sings, “Well, time rushes on babe.”
Prosaically, Rift is a break-up album. But that is purely scratching the surface, as it is much more expansive and diverse. Mann creates songs out of infinitesimal and seemingly insignificant details, capturing the interior world of her characters with a painterly application that brings to mind Vermeer—not some lovelorn folkie. What is for some singer-songwriters the tedious minutiae of every day is poetry for an eagle-eyed Mann.
Mann’s terse writing is matched by her sense of melody, which, combined, causes songs to chill you to the bone like a morning frost; they settle with a familiarity and a strangeness, never quite establishing a fixed position, oscillating between both states with an unflinching honesty.
Confessional poetry is often criticized for being too on the nose, self-indulgent, and direct. In the minor-key, piano-ballad “Stadiums”, Clara Mann sings, “I write confessions.” Neither being clever nor ironic, Mann is stating a fact. In a world of dissembling and pretence, saying how you feel is, admittedly, an act of revolution. Even in art, satire can be used as a mask—the naked truth can be too much to bear. Like folk artists old and new, Mann bares her soul while remaining elliptical on Rift, creating this arresting blend of directness and detachment.
“Remember Me (Train Song)” suffuses the track with a yearning melancholy like an oppressive light. So listless is the singer that she appears to be drowning in her recollection, fate, and sadness. Moreover, this despondency is augmented by fingerpicking that echoes Leonard Cohen‘s flamenco guitar playing, before a minor-key piano and a muffled drum buttress the piece. Like a Cohen song, there is a subtle melodic ascent, resulting in a transcendent experience.
The narrator of “Remember Me (Train Song)” wants to be remembered by a former lover. But, ultimately, she lets him go. Wearing his old working shirt, the narrator is physically enveloped by him. Like Bob Dylan singing “your memory grows dimmer” in “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven”, the narrator poetically declares, “your memory fades”—when it is her memory of him. Slowly and surely, she finds a source of hope in place of his absence: the sun, another motif of Rift.
The poignant “Doubled Over” portrays a lover wavering between freedom and rekindling a relationship. In the chorus, Clara Mann, with an achingly falsetto, ruefully sings, “Now am doubled over you.” And, with a brief piano coda, “Doubled Over” makes you wonder how long the narrator will be doubled over for.
Along with “It Only Hurts”, Mann recorded “Rift” in the living room studio belonging to her friend Tom Kellett while the rest of the record was recorded at 4AD Studios. In the titular track, “The Rift”, the narrator declares that she was broken up with midway through June. Singing over a circular acoustic guitar pattern, Mann, despite a wistful tone, imparts a hopeful sentiment at the end of the song: “Just the sun above me and my keys and my car.”
The last track on the album, “The Dream”, finds Mann channelling one of her major influences, Tom Waits. Producing slow, plangent chords on a forlorn piano—echoing Waits’ debut album Closing Time (1973)— “The Dream” shows that Mann can be a rheumy-eyed balladeer capable of limerence with real depth, potency, and originality. And, with the narrator dreaming, Rift ends on a sanguine note.
With its homespun folk tunes, Rift is like a tête-à-tête between close friends under a crepuscular sky that leaves you listening to every word with the utmost attention—and wishing for the conversation to continue long into the night. Fans of Laura Marling will hear traces of her early work in Rift. But the power of Mann’s music doesn’t come from its antecedents—it stems from her introspective vignettes. In his song “Anthem”, Cohen famously wrote, “There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” Indeed, Rift is that hopeful crack.