Naomi Keyte — ‘Milk Paper Gold’
Words by Jack Paech // Photos by Rosina Possingham
Keyte’s adherence to organic instrumentation and slow, sparse production leaves space for the natural world to flood into its cracks on new album, Milk Paper Gold
The most consistent through line across Milk Paper Gold is Naomi Keyte’s diaristic approach to songwriting. In directing her storyteller’s eye at intimate moments of heavy significance, Keyte’s latest batch of songs end up feeling like they’ve spontaneously sprouted from soft earth, swaying idly in late afternoon sun.
For the listener who’s stumbled across these snapshots of organic beauty, it at first feels voyeuristic – like we’ve accidentally touched upon the silent epiphany of some stranger. Keyte, however, acknowledges the person on the other side. Her breathy falsetto and the delicate strumming of her acoustic immediately position the listener as a member of a close-knit circle, whose dialogue is lined with stark honesty and optimism in the face of a world that seems determined to drive them apart.
Milk Paper Gold addresses themes of isolation, spiritual struggle and our attachment to the mundane. The sadness here is fresh and real, but Keyte refuses to be lost in it. Across the record, she answers her own existential questions with impressive clarity. In ‘Homesick’ – a lovelorn piano ballad haunted by absence – she asks in the hook, “What am I going to do now?”, but she’s already proven she knows the answer in ‘Gillian’, when she repeats “I will sing and sing until I cannot sing / sing when I am old”.
The dichotomy illustrates the complexity of human emotion, but it also reveals a thesis statement for the record: that devoting ourselves to our passion is what gives meaning to our lives. In ‘Hard to make plans’, she sings that she overheard her subject yearning to “fly to LA and play in Phoebe Bridgers’ band”, and the line is delivered with the kind of empathy that suggests Keyte has similar aspirations. Elsewhere, her love for music and for harmony drifts into the periphery of her mixes. Wordless backing vocals imbue tracks like ‘Breaktooth Park’ with an otherworldly dimension. In ‘Circles’, when her delivery is stripped back to a whisper, it feels like Keyte is taking a deep breath, making the chaos around her docile with nothing but tenderness, a fingerpicked steel string, and a muffled kick drum. These songs are dedicated to slowness, to patience, or as Keyte puts it in ‘Morningtide’, living “at the true pace of the world”.
The album reflects the true pace of the world in its atmosphere. Keyte’s adherence to organic instrumentation and slow, sparse production leaves space for the natural world to flood into its cracks. You can feel the wind in this album, the hushed bristling of leaves. Drums are used sparingly, and when they are used, they mimic a distant heartbeat. The reverb sounds more like it was captured in an open space rather than achieved through a plug-in, and as the sum of all these things, Milk Paper Gold carries itself with the self-assured nature of a small piece of the world that can never be removed or replaced. For a moment, it’s as inextricably linked to the listener’s lived experience as a handful of soil, or a throat full of hoarse laughter.
