ML Buch’s Glistening Sound Bath Heals Brooklyn

Serene to the point of holiness, ML Buch’s music both interrogates and sanctifies our uncanny present: When humanity itself is being probed to find out what makes us different from the computers; when communing with nature can mean looking at a subway ad touting the beauty of Upstate New York; when our souls are becoming untethered from our bodies, our flesh picked apart under the cell phone glow.

However dystopian all that may sound, the Danish songwriter, composer, and producer is not exactly a doomsayer. Her patient work, which deconstructs the slick sounds of 1980s stalwarts like the Police and Dire Straits, soothes as it takes stock of where we’re at as a species. Her two albums so far, 2020’s Skinned and last year’s Suntub, earn their place in the modern uneasy-listening canon, with Buch singing about fleshless hands and baskets of muscle and rays of sun igniting an endless ocean atop soundscapes that can’t seem to fully decide if they want to be unsettling or wondrous.

Seeing her perform last night helped clarify her intent. The show took place at Pioneer Works, a former iron factory in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and its high ceilings, exposed beams, and big windows gave the evening a churchly air. Accompanied by drummer Rebbe Molina, Buch stood tall in a long, black, backless dress as she commanded the attention of the very sold-out crowd of around 1,000 people with an unruffled sense of purpose. At one point, she perched her leg on top of one of the monitor speakers, but it didn’t read like a rock-star flourish as much as Buch simply taking an opportunity to stretch her calf.

Inside such a cavernous space, her songs sounded like hymns, offerings of solace amid the chaos and destruction that fills our phones and our minds every single minute of the day. There was very little banter, so as not to break the spell of her precise sounds. But it was genuinely heartwarming to see the singer, who can seem sphinx-like, break into a few broad smiles while accepting between-song applause. Her music can unsettle, but there’s joy in it, too.

Listening to Buch’s songs, and watching the steady way she comports herself on stage, I can’t help but long for the Scandinavian lifestyle. However much I fight it, my ugly American brain is often lunging at ambition, at work, at what’s next. Which makes straightforward lines like, “Today, I don’t care to climb/I just wanna take my time,” from Suntub’s “Flames Shards Goo,” so revelatory to me. Listening to that song amid a sea of self-conscious Brooklyn strivers, many of whom were wearing nondescript black coats that nonetheless looked very expensive, felt like a collective unclenching. Why do we try so hard?

Two of the concert’s most poignant moments came near the end. “I’m a Girl You Can Hold IRL” is about fighting our escape into screens. But it doesn’t sound like a fight; it sounds like we’ve already lost. It sounds like mourning. “I’m coming through the screen/Crawling on your table,” she sang. “My mouth against your neck/A trickling sap of maple.” On paper, the lines are surreally violent. But delivered in the song, which is spacious to the point of almost being a cappella, they are devastating—a last-ditch attempt at breaking through. When she repeated the song’s corporeal title phrase again and again over cosmic organs, it felt like a mantra, and a reminder.

Molina left the stage before the night’s closer, “Working It Out,” leaving Buch alone, strumming her guitar, singing to herself and everyone else. It’s a song of understanding, of not beating yourself up, of coming to terms with not having your shit together at all times. “You’re working it out,” she sang, “and your body can care for another.” It can be heard as a maternal anthem, or an ode to basic human connection. When she sang, “I give you the hug of a sister,” it felt like a real embrace—person to person, beating heart to beating heart.