Tara Angell's Come Down

A little over twenty years ago, Brooklyn-based visual artist and singer-songwriter Tara Angell released her first and final studio album, Come Down. The title couldn’t be more perfect; this is an album for the afterparty, the walk home by yourself in the dark early morning with heavy eyes and greasy hair and questions left unanswered if not unasked. It is lonely and honest and beautiful, and in straight, easy tones it communicates feelings that many of us don’t know how to express.

Angell croons the lyric, “Slowly numbing myself out of devotion” to open the record on “Untrue”, a wide-open and forlorn ballad. Every sound is half asleep, every line is muffled and dreary. The song feels like a kind of endpoint, but at the same time, it’s a perfect representation of the feeling of the album overall.

Things kick into motion with “Hollow Hope”, a semi-Stones-ey mid-2000s rock song. But the momentum doesn’t last long. Track 3, “When You Find Me”, is a stunning ballad about moving on from a relationship that has ended or never really started. The lyrics are simple and direct, the way things feel when you’re drunk and alone, and every memory of a certain thing or person you have left sort of converges into a single emotion. “The World Will Match Your Pain” feels similar, but a little more hopeful. 

“B–tch Please” is one of the album’s lighter moments, but it’s also one of my favorites. Tara’s soft voice and a barebones, barely tuned electric guitar rattle on over the sound of a group of people talking and joking in the background. “Uneven” is slow and contemplative and beautiful. 

I think my favorite song on Come Down, though, is the quietly stunning closer, “The Big One”. The song is about some kind of closeness, and extremely intimate something, even if it's not something good. I don’t know how to describe it very well.

This album is very important to me. I found it towards the end of my freshman year of college. At the time, everything felt very new and strange and empty. Like many people, I hadn’t really figured out who I was or what I wanted yet, and it didn’t seem like things were headed in any clear direction. All I had to think about was a lot of things that had happened a long time ago and had been disappointing when they happened. This album communicated what I was feeling at the time really well, and it made that period in my life feel so much more real.

I decided to write this blog because I found out recently that Tara Angell passed away in August at the age of sixty-one. I don’t know all that much about her, but I hope that she knew how much her music had affected others, if only a small group of them. I just want to say that I’m thankful.