st228

MUSIC FEATURE

visit jbhifi.com.au/stack

arrangement isn't the sort of peaceful flow you'd imagine: its beat thumps slowly and almost menacingly deep, like knuckles hitting a palm – a determined pulse. “I think because it was such a powerful moment, maybe,” McMahon offers of this choice. “I mean, literally what I did was just watch the birds in the sky, and then cry. It was such a fragile experience, but I had this big – opening? Something quite powerful opened up. It was such a significant moment depicting my relationship with nature. And I wrote a Later, when she decided to assemble a track whose themes revolved around "climate despair" or

Light, Dark, Light Again by Angie McMahon is out Oct 27 via AWAL.

poem about it.”

solastalgia, she returned to the poem. “They’re very different worlds colliding, but that’s been my experience with nature,” she says. “Over the last couple of years I’ve had a couple of really beautiful, spiritual moments with nature, and they were both

It was such a fragile experience, but I had this big – opening? Something quite powerful opened up...

fragile and intense... they shake your core a bit! Part of me is like, why the f-ck aren’t I thinking about this all the time, and celebrating this all the time, and fighting for this all the time?” (Of this track, McMahon mentions she's been getting her bristly conductor jag on to make sure we experience Mother Nature properly live: “[My band and I are] getting ready for a couple of shows, and there’s all these harmonies at the end – like the flocks of birds – and I was being such a tyrant. I was like, ‘You have to get it right ! We have to sound like a heavenly choir of bird-angels !' And they’re like, ‘Okay...'”, she grins.) McMahon describes first single Saturn Returning – also the album's opener, and an enormously cinematic baklava of small elements – as embodying “where [she] had landed” during the project. “I felt like it set the intention to approach the listening experience with self-compassion, and forgiveness,” she explains. “Through writing the record I was forgiving myself for a whole bunch of sh-t, and acknowledging that I was afraid of a whole bunch of sh-t. And I just felt like that song set it..."

INTERVIEW

SALT OF THE EARTH, STAR OF THE SKY When Angie McMahon released her debut album Salt in 2019, the Oz musicsphere's spoon stopped halfway to its mouth in awe. Six years on the indie singer-songwriter is ready to release her second record, and in contrast to its predecessor, McMahon has expanded her palette into more dynamic shades.We spoke to her about the stunning Light, Dark, Light Again . Words Zoë Radas

L ight, dark. Ground, sky. Life, death. As its title suggests, Light, Dark, Light Again considers dualities. But it's the movement between those positions – the undulations, and the way states return to a former shape, before changing again – which Angie McMahon finds fascinating. Before the writing of this album, the Melbourne musician went through a period of

forced recuperation, and with it came a tuning in. She'd lie in her front garden and stare at the sky, and every afternoon murmurations of birds would gather and transmute in motion, creating shapes which looked to her like a wave, a fist, a storm. The artist sings about watching this phenomenon in album stand-out Mother Nature , but the actual instruments'

Continue reading the full article online at jbhifi.com.au/stack

o

m

n

This time 40 years ago, The Cure released (one of) their now-signature song(s), The Love Cats. The track was released just two months after the West Sussex lads had recorded it in Paris's Studio Des Dames. The clip includes shots of a mansion, access to which the group were granted after they lied to the real estate company (having told the agent they were interested in buying the property; they returned the keys the following morning). They intended to use real cats during filming, but the felines didn't cooperate, and they ended up mainly subbing in the taxidermied variety.

t

s

h

i

Y 40

h

T

O

E

G

A

A

R

S

Robert Smith in the clip for The Love Cats (1983)

OCTOBER 2023

jbhifi.com.au

8