V.V. Lightbody's 'Period Piece' Is a Deceptively Sunny Masterpiece of Arrangement
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Sam Cantor’s bass is the album’s quiet spine, mixed soft-edged and melodic rather than percussive, with Jack Henry Lickerman’s drums kept dry and small. Greg Obis mastered at Chicago Mastering Service and resisted the urge to inflate anything; the record stays conversational at volume.
The Spatial Dynamics: Six rooms went into this — Jamdek, International Anthem Studios, Foxhall, Exit Slip, Crofton Circle and Moonbody — and the seams are deliberately audible. Lightbody is the lead producer here for the first time, with Dave Vettraino adding production and co-mixing, and the result layers close-miked vocals against genuinely roomy strings. Macie Stewart’s strings on “Best Problem” and “Precious Moments” arrive from much further back in the field than anything else on the record.
Standout Performance
Emma Hospelhorn. The nice surprise on an album by a musician Chicago calls the flute lady is that the flutes are mostly somebody else’s: Hospelhorn plays them on “Practice Smiling,” “Satisfied” and “Robocaller,” alongside keys and Farfisa, while Lightbody takes the flute only on closer “Blue Within Blue.” Handing off your signature instrument is a producer’s decision, and it works.
Why It’s Certified
The title came from a period-drama binge — Austen adaptations, The Gilded Age, The Empress — and then turned into something sharper: a snapshot of her own present as its own period piece. “Even if we lived two hundred years ago, we always have our silly little problems,” she told Newcity, whose Elizabeth Jakaitis nailed the record’s trick as “honey with a little heat” and caught how Lightbody “often uses it percussively” when she sings.
Cassandra Jenkins turns up on “Robocaller” doing harmonies and whispers. Her great-grandfather’s big band and her grandmother’s piano close out “Patience Like A Pilot” from archival tape. Echoes and Dust noted she “defies that old singer-songwriter label” by covering ground from modern pop to jazz inside single songs. Ten tracks, no filler, and a whole lot of corset-loosening.