Doomsday and a Dog Eulogy—“Punisher” Review
In “Punisher”, Phoebe Bridgers mourns times yet to come and people gone by.
Phoebe Bridgers misses her dog.
She misses other things too: things not yet seen or felt, painful life events, people she never knew but found herself reflected in. But she mostly misses Max, her pug/talisman/familiar that passed away roughly a year ago. The liner inside her vinyl says as much: FOR MAX. Were this album imbued with a touch more necromancy, perhaps he’d be back in her living room, slightly muddy but with the eyes bulging and tongue still out as all pugs do. Alas, it was not. Max still sits under the grass in her yard, and his ghost leaves paw prints on the emotions of this record.
Ghost imagery is nothing new to Bridgers, whose singles and album artwork on her debut Stranger in the Alps featured painted ghosts over her childhood photos. It’s not necessarily that Phoebe knows a ton of dead people, but there’s a revisited sensation on Punisher that she is just unable to touch the people in her life, to connect spiritually with her surroundings. She is just outside of the frame, stuck like Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life. This distance was present on Stranger, spelled out in songs like “Funeral” and “Scott Street” with the sensation of not belonging in the spaces you occupy, but it takes on a new, pandemic-flavored spin here.
Punisher is not as mournful a record as Stranger but in true “emo folk” Phoebe Bridgers fashion, it is raw. She is imprisoned alone in a house, stuck near a hospital during quarantine, where sirens cut through sleep and she is left to recall an era of outdoor socialization that feels fainter by the minute. It is a product of her forced environment, just like so many other records released this season, and it transports the listener to somewhere in between the present reality and other points in time.
In many moments, it feels like being in the phone booth from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, hurtling through a CGI space-time vortex to pop out on the road to Memphis (Graceland Too), the stratosphere (Chinese Satellite), or the moon (Moon Song, obviously). The album grounds itself occasionally with the microscopic focus on the mundane that every great songwriter possesses: an “America-first rap country song” on the radio, notches in door frames to mark the passage of time. It is an exercise, ironically, in standing close enough to see the brush strokes on a canvas—a line she sings in “I See You” (or “ICU”—the title was lengthened for the single with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic but reverts to ICU on the album”).
The lemniscate of emotional distance and intense detail fixation also operates as a way for Phoebe to process heartbreak from protective isolation. So many of Punisher’s songs recognize the inevitability of loss, the acceptance of finality. This is an album about endings. This is an album about escape, one where, when the end comes, Phoebe and maybe someone she loves (but also maybe not) will fly up into the stars and just watch their old home burn. In her dreams, she is free to travel as she pleases, but when she wakes up in her bed, tangled in sweaty sheets and guitar strings, her jail sentence resumes.
There’s an underlying irony in her loneliness that is impossible to ignore: her second solo album comes of the heels of two thoroughly praised collaborative albums: boygenius and Better Oblivion Community Center, created alongside Julien Baker/Lucy Dacus and Conor Oberst, respectively. All three of those voices are here, engaging in dialogue with Phoebe on various lines; Baker and Dacus appear as an echo for Bridgers in “Graceland Too” and Oberst chimes in on the final lines of “Halloween”.
Max is in many ways a vessel for Phoebe to convey feelings. Dog references litter this album, as she twice uses the image of a dog carrying a bird in its mouth (Moon Song and I Know the End) to convey waiting patiently for praise and attention. She occupies either side of this metaphor, finding herself both pining and pined for; she orbits the rooms in her house like a pet circling into its bed. She is digging up the skeletons buried in her garden and trying to make sense of the bones. Punisher is sorting through grief from a state of torpor and apathy. She does not believe in a god. She doesn’t know what comes after death. But she wishes there was something there, something bigger than herself. It just isn’t in her heart to keep pretending there is.
When she sings “there’s a last time for everything” on “Halloween”, it isn’t with fear or anger. It tastes like resignation. When Phoebe reaches the doomsday lines — lines like “No, I’m not afraid to disappear/The billboard said ‘The End Is Near’” on “I Know the End”— there’s even a peaceful acceptance. This is life and, observed from a distance, the things that broke Bridgers’ heart in Stranger in the Alps no longer cut the same way. The former was a clearing of the throat, a shot to the head. The latter attempts to cure nothing but merely observe. The horns, strings, and electric guitar that fill the acoustic gaps in this album are far fuller sounds than the haunting bare-bones tones of Stranger, and with them comes a fuller Phoebe. She knows what she can do, for better or worse.
The album title, Punisher, refers to a fan so relentlessly passionate about an artist that they will hold the artist conversationally hostage after a show. Bridgers has professed on Genius and in interviews that she fears legendary departed songwriter Elliott Smith might have considered her a punisher if they’d ever met, but those feelings of being an unwanted hanger-on don’t end on the title track:
“Not even the burnouts are out here anymore/And you had to go/I know, I know, I know.” — I Know The End
“I used to light you up/Now I can’t even get you to play the drums”—I See You
“I would do anything, I would do anything/Whatever you want me to do, I will do”—Graceland Too
Phoebe is the Punisher, just as she was the Killer three years ago. This is an evolution, one that marks a journey through blaming herself for failures to accepting that sometimes even the best connections fall empty in time. No one lives forever, not even the best-behaved pugs.
What happens when the end comes?
