There is no grand, overarching storyline to Save As, the second solo album from Elena Tonra’s Ex:Re project. Rather, the album – produced by Fabian Prynn and also featuring Josephine Stephenson on cello, Hinako Omori on synthesisers, Ben Reed on bass and Jethro Fox on electric guitar – is the latest in the Daughter lead singer’s catalogue of expert chronicles of the gnawing minutiae of human consciousness: the over-thinking that consumes us, and the places we travel to escape. The title of album opener “Radio Station”, which begins with stately strummed acoustic guitar and morphs into a trippy song about an endless California roadtrip, is a metaphor for how Tonra feels about her mind. “I end up getting stuck because I can’t make decisions,” she says. Demo recordings live on in many of the final cuts, as on “Sleep”, which Tonra first recorded in a hotel room in Paris. The final version features a melodic loop made from the demo’s acoustic guitar run through a vocoder and a drum machine, which together offer a muffled quality to the sound, like hearing a party through a wall. Other tracks, such as the stand-out “Am I Even Real?”, a Tonra-Prynn duet on which Tonra sings about spaceships to ask whether she is being true to herself in a relationship, found their true version in the studio. That combination of long-held ideas stored in notebooks and on laptops with unfiltered first thoughts and improvisations is key to the album’s perfect mingling of liveliness and deep thoughtfulness.
