"NORTH FACE" is track ten on I'm a Hurricane I'm a Woman in Love , one step before the closer, and it carries the weight of someone who has been inside the record long enough to see what it is building toward. The reference to North Face, the outdoor apparel brand associated with cold weather and protection, is the kind of image Lapsley uses well: something functional that becomes emotional, an object that carries a feeling without announcing it. She has always written about weather as emotional infrastructure: wind, cold, and warmth doing the work that more direct language would labor over. "NORTH FACE" fits in that tradition. The production is full and deliberate, and her voice here is at its most confident placement in the record's architecture. The album as a whole was a critical statement of where she is as an artist at 28, a decade into a career that started when she was still a teenager. "NORTH FACE" is a strong argument for the whole project.
Låpsley