STACK #208 Feb 2022

MUSIC REVIEWS

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Tears for Fears The Tipping Point Tears For Fears’ first new studio album in nearly two decades was inspired by a series of ‘tipping points’ that the duo have surmounted – both professionally and personally –since the release of their previous album, Everybody Loves a Happy Ending (2004). In 2017, Roland Orzabal’s wife Caroline passed away. “I was watching her become a ghost of her former self,” he painfully recalled of the inspiration behind this record’s title track, which places our narrator in a hospital ward observing terminally ill patients: “Life is cruel, life is tough/ Life is crazy, then it all turns to dust...”

Big Thief Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You On their fifth record, Big Thief have bunkered down to produce a double album that takes their indie folk to sprawling new heights. Whether a song tackles universal themes or the minutiae of everyday life, Big Thief approach their subjects with a striking tenderness captured within vocalist Adrianne Lenker’s evocative lyricism. Across the album the band dazzle with their expansive instrumentation, with highlights including a stirring flute on No Reason and a fiddle on Red Moon , the latter transforming the song into a jamboree. The most magical moments of the album come when Lenker and guitarist Buck Meek sing together, their emotive voices uniting on 12000 Lines , to rousing effect. (4AD/Remote Control) Holly Pereira

Aiming to produce a string of potential singles to rival the success of Tears For Fears’ heyday classics (think: Shout and Head Over Heels ), their previous management initiated collaborations with an array of ‘today’s hitmakers’ – another tipping point, which inspired the duo to pick up acoustic guitars in search of some much-needed depth, heart and soul. Soon after, No Small Thing miraculously materialised – from just two pairs of hands, as an updated Tears For Fears artist statement about freedom. Only a couple of songs from what the pair has since described as “disastrous sessions” appear on The Tipping Point : Please Be Happy – a harrowing plea to a depressed loved one, delivered with heartbreaking fragility over sparse piano chords and weeping strings – and the robo-voiced, industrial stomp of My Demons. To close, a remixed version of Stay – one of the two new songs Tears For Fears recorded for their 2017 best-of compilation, Rule the World – leaves us with a lyrical quandary: “Stay, don’t stay/ Go, don’t go…” The Tipping Point is a tender, contemplative, enveloping experience: “Listen as your poor heart breaks.” (Concord) Bryget Chrisfield

FEATURE ARTIST

Mitski Laurel Hill

William Crighton Water and Dust It starts with the sound of crows squawking and a rumbling didgeridoo. William Crighton’s music transports the listener somewhere else. On his third album, the terrain is the Aussie outback and all the mysteries, menace and magic it has to offer. Crighton burns with the ragged intensity of the Warumpi Band and he’s a classic Australian storyteller like Neil Murray and John Schumann. He’s also a strikingly singular talent, who paints vivid images before being devastatingly direct. “I don’t understand why our elected leaders become bottom feeders to the corporate man,” he rages in Your Country. But then there’s hope, in his interpretation of Henry Lawson’s After All (Good World). “My heart grows brave,” he declares, “and the world to me is a

FEATURE ARTIST

Mitski Miyawaki continues her stylistic evolution on Laurel Hill , the Japanese-American’s sixth solo record and her most daring to date. From making an identity crisis sound euphoric on Working for the Knife to pairing disco rhythms with the feeling of being beaten on Stay Soft , Miyawaki’s vulnerability is on full display – though her melancholic, guitar- driven instrumentation is a thing of the past. Synths play a starring role across the record, giving each track an undeniably euphoric quality and heightening Miyawaki’s emotion, as she writes with her heart on her sleeve. Laurel Hill is a masterclass in pop and serves as an exciting new chapter for one of music’s

The Whitlams Sancho

“I’ve got to tell you how I feel,” Tim Freedman sings at the start of Sancho , The Whitlams’ first studio album for 16 years. The song – a cover of Megan Washington’s Catherine Wheel, the only cover on the album – is a stunning opening to a record about love, life and loss. “Kiss me like we’re going to die,”

Freedman adds. “And I do not know how I’m going to heal.” 'Sancho' was the name Freedman gave to the band’s tour manager Greg Weaver, who died in 2019. Sancho , the album, is a touching tribute. The centrepiece of the record is Sancho in Love , the story of his rock ’n’ roll life, capped by Jak Housden’s glorious guitar solo. The Whitlams have delivered the first great album of 2022. Aided by the deft touch of producer Daniel Denholm, it showcases the beauty of Freedman’s finest work: sardonic songs sung sweetly. Even when he sings about hapless criminals, it’s backed by some happy piano. The contrast is disconcerting, but the contradiction is compelling. “It’s a confidence game, you know,” he confides in the title track. He could be referring to songwriting, where every song is a leap of faith, a gamble, where “it’s always Race 8, the Get Out Stakes”. But sometimes you back a winner. “So we ride tonight, Sancho,” Freedman sings, “to another glorious victory of song.” (E.G. Records/MGM) Jeff Jenkins

most sought-after voices. (Dead Oceans/Inertia) Holly Pereira

good world after all.” (ABC) Jeff Jenkins

84 FEBRUARY 2022

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