Exploring love, trust, and power in human relationships, Have You in My Wilderness is Holter's fourth album of dreamy, intimate yet cinematic vignettes that again demonstrate her unique talent; at once avant-garde and intellectual, but also sensual and primal. It is also her most accessible work to date, even 'pop' friendly. Largely, though not entirely, eschewing the literary reference strewn approach of her previous work – whereby the likes of Claudio Collette, Virginia Woolf and Greek tragedies all figure prominently – Holter's more personal, and impressionistic sketches are still largely oblique and enigmatic, but nevertheless set to elevate her beyond cult indiedom into something approaching the mainstream.

 
Throughout Have You in My Wilderness, Holter seeks truth, meaning and love, in her world of uncertainty and distrust, whether it’s biographical or third person. Memory plays a big part here; it's often profound vagueness and selective filing, feeding into the romanticisation of love, and her ‘discussions’ of power struggles and ownership on the level of the personal politic. There are lots of visual snapshots here, like there is for every mortal humanoid, stored in their memory banks, Holter rallying to work it out – as is any thinker's wont – making the connections, even if haphazardly. "Can I feel you? Are you mythological? Figures pass so quickly that I realise my eyes know very well/It's impossible to see who I'm waiting for in my raincoat" is a typical memory versus intellectual versus primal couplet that Holter seems to conjure readily. There is always a danger with her that pretentiousness and a semi-stream of consciousness will derail the flow, and the meaning. It is perhaps purposefully that Holter loosens the narrative and instead lets her subconscious speak for her. At the end of the day Holter’s music is about feeling, rather than anything overtly conceptualised.
 
But, at the same time, Holter has reined in her propensity for the avante-garde, allowing, nay encouraging, an impressionistic pop sensibility to rear its more accessible head, influenced heavily it seems by the baroque pop mysteries of Scott Walker. Moreover, her vocals are more to the forefront, and clearer in general. Musically, and sonically, it’s all the better for it. From the dreamy pop, strings and harpsichord infused Feel You to the stuttering drums led Silhouette and the vaguely Pet Sounds-esque musical palette of She Calls Me Home, which also features some marvellous shronking sax, there is a strong 60s feel throughout much of the album.
 
Meanwhile her natural theatricality shines through on tracks such as How Long, where she lowers her voice an octave, does a Nico impression, accompanied by some full-bodied strings and synths. Then there’s the stream of consciousness that is Lucette Stranded on the Island, set within an expressionful musical setting: “I call my name aloud looking for what I remember/My name I know, I love going to the movies/I turn and see my childhood home on this strange beach, where strange birds fly”. And on the extraordinary Betsy on the Roof, Holter’s fragile and melancholic voice and music slowly morphs into something altogether more feral and energetic, her piano playing becoming increasingly frenzied and chaotic, before a calm sets in to close the song out. And Vasquez – about some East Coast bandido – sees Holter employ a dream like deep jazz groove before easing into sonic abstraction, all with the help, as throughout the album, of her co-producer and musical collaborator Cole M Greif-Neill.
As she has said: “Come be in my wilderness … come be in my world, don’t you want me to take you and be in my world”? Indeed, you might just want to turn the lights down, turn up the music, and listen to the wonderfully weird, challenging and yet accessible music that Holter has made.
Jeff Hemmings