Review: Julianna Barwick’s Healing Is a Miracle Is Music as Spiritual Renewal

The album overcomes its slightness thanks to its willingness to dabble in different textures.

Julianna Barwick, Healing Is a Miracle
Photo: Jen Medina

As a singer, composer, and producer, Julianna Barwick uses her vocals as a foundation, stacking multi-tracks of her voice with strings and piano, and blending it all beneath layers of reverb. Save for the occasional poetic repetitions and formed thoughts, she doesn’t sing actual words, fusing emotions and imagined spaces through a collage of vocables and human noise. Upon first listen, her songs can feel monotonous, but tiny modulations give them dynamism. They don’t drone so much as pleasantly sustain a pace and mood.

Barwick’s fourth album, Healing Is a Miracle, is a tale of spiritual renewal that’s both striking and, even at 34 minutes, patience-testing. As its title indicates, the album takes on the abstract subject of systems of regeneration, both natural and otherwise. The opening track, “Inspirit,” comes on like a wall of sound, Barwick’s ecstatic vocals giving the impression of finding wonder in the mundane, the vocal parts joined together in a powerful cluster, barely distinguishable as she sings, “Open your heart/It’s in your head.”

While Barwick’s style can be wondrous, it isn’t fanciful, acknowledging the ebb and flow of life and death. On “Flowers,” a harsh, buzzy synth nearly overwhelms the choral arrangement in a way that grounds Barwick’s breathy vocals, while the percussion on “In Light,” featuring guest vocals from Jónsi, galumphs steadily like a heartbeat before tapering off, evoking the fragility of human life. Healing Is a Miracle is well sequenced, and its songs’ emphasis on direction achieves a circuitousness that plays nicely with album’s chosen theme of life cycles.

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A longing for connection to a higher power—a notion of singing to the heavens—is a thread that runs throughout Barwick’s work. While her vocals on Healing Is a Miracle are less celestial than those on her 2011 breakout, The Magic Place, these songs similarly show an interest in the directionality of sound. The trajectory of “Safe” is one of gradual elevation and an ever-approaching proximity, employing distancing techniques for something more terrestrial rather than otherworldly. Likewise, “Wishing Well” seems to find Barwick pining for earthly connection, the vocals reaching outward as opposed to heavenward.

Considered though it is, though, Healing Is a Miracle can sometimes be so delicate as to be weightless, and the music’s accumulation of details and small shifts in tone makes it more interesting in theory than practice. Even still, the album overcomes its slightness thanks to its willingness to dabble in different textures, from the electronic flourishes featured throughout to the influence of hip-hop beatsmith Nosaj Thing on the closing track, “Nod.” Healing Is a Miracle is music as balm, with the human voice a vehicle for rejuvenation.

Score: 
 Label: Ninja Tune  Release Date: July 10, 2020  Buy: Amazon

Charles Lyons-Burt

Charles Lyons-Burt covers the government contracting industry by day and culture by night. His writing has also appeared in Spectrum Culture, In Review Online, and Battleship Pretension.

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