Album Review: Rachel Cribby, Fragile / Fine

Rachel Cribby occupies the slash in the title of her EP, Fragile / Fine. She feels slightly askew and is built by tacking together conflicting emotional states. In Cribby’s fragile moments, she is heartbroken, gets out of bed at 1:30 PM, and is trapped in a cycle of self-doubt: “I am worried that I am not good, I am self-absorbed and irritating,” she sings on the standout track “Masquerade.” But to close her release, on “I Want Love,” Cribby sounds like she’s beginning to feel settled and every time she sings “I want love,” she becomes more determined to get what she deserves. Despite everything, she is fine.

Although the mostly melancholic EP finds Cribby struggling with her doubts, Cribby transforms her anxieties into genial sounding songs. The acoustic guitar and piano combination of “Ears Covered” is charged with a resoluteness that sounds like how it feels when your brain fog starts to fade and a playful ticking electronic beat is the foundation of the warm and close-knit piano and guitar driven track “Necessary Evil”. The lightly rollicking percussion and the twanging guitar riff that’s threaded throughout “Masquerade,” also injects the EP with a buoyancy that makes you feel like Cribby is well on her way to self-fulfillment.

Fragile / Fine was released December 11, 2020.
Listen to it here.