krissanthemum

By Emma Madden

Krissanthemum (Krissy Lassiter) makes music in a world without tolerance for a body in pain. The Band Sounded Tight and the Timing Was Right, her first studio album, emerged during years of unmanaged, debilitating menstrual illness—years when jobs kept letting her go and doctors minimized her pain. But the album’s prevailing mood is not despair. Instead, it’s full of wryness and joy: stacked harmonies, chiming guitars, buoyant melodies. The record could only have materialized once Lassiter found a creative community that treated her with the empathy and dignity the rest of the world denied her. If the record tells a story, it’s this one: even when her body was in agonizing pain and the world tried to shift it to the side, she kept showing up for her friends; the band; and making something that sounded like a body in full health. She had to. The band sounded tight; the timing was right. 

With stacked, sun-warmed harmonies, arch emotional candor, and the winking deadpan of anti-comedy, the album feels at once tender and funny. In Krissanthemum’s case, pain always lands with a punchline. Leaning into the anti-humor mode of delivering bleakness with a straight face, Krissanthemum is constitutionally funny across the record. Even at her sickest, she aimed to laugh, to be the advice friend. That instinct shapes the album’s emotional temperature: sadness is present, but so is a stubborn lightness. “Watching Gordon Ramsay on the television / I’m not doing enough,” she sings on ‘Pick It Up/Take Me Higher’.

Musically, the record lives somewhere between Elephant 6 psych-pop and bedroom emo: bright, layered, melody-forward songs that smuggle despair inside candy-coated harmonies.