Sydneyfan
04-25-2007, 11:31 PM
Just out this week - this is a terrific album from a singer/songwriter who should be much better known. The review pretty much covers it.
These things I know to be true: sad songs make you cry; yearning songs can remind you of what it feels like to hurt; loss is universally understoodand never disappears. And there are always plenty of ballad-heavy albums around that can fulfil the desire to feel or share those emotions. Lord knows I've wallowed in them many a time and will again.
However, the great albums of heartbreak are the ones that invoke a wider and more complex range of emotions incorporating sadness, yearning and loss and also the shared pleasure of memory, the anger of regret, the celebration of minutia (for what are our lives but accumulated minutia?) and the tentative steps into the future.
Good albums do that in the songs; great albums do that at a deeper level, in something beyond words and music. They simultaneously open up an ache and soothe it. That is what Lisa Miller's Morning in the Bowl of Night does.
This is in one sense an album drawn from, and infused with, the death of her mother. But there is so much more to it than that. It's also about adulthood, responsibility and memory, about faith and its substitutes, about laughter and joy. About living. And it's all done with such grace and simplicity, with such intimacy and honesty - lyrical and musical - that it insinuates itself into your life completely.
There are moments of quiet excellence. Such a Find, so airy and delicate, with its 1950s strings and Miller in angelic mode; Lucky Dip Roses, with its mandolin and swaying rhythm underneath Miller's front-of-the-picture vocals; Amused & Confused, with its wry observations of a certain type of pop star appropriately matched with wry banjo.
Then there are songs that are, without even a hint of excess, utterly devastating. Motherless prises your heart open with exquisite gentleness; the lightly skipping Snowman detonates in you hours later. And then there is the willowy Point Ormond, the album's centrepiece.
It begins "it's been six months of a life sentence/and it just keeps getting harder/harder to mention your name" and later tears you up with "I wear your old shirt/shampoo bottle in the shower/kept your last crossword/word of the day was overpowered". But it packs the most velvet-gloved punch in the understated chorus where Miller sings oh, so gently, "why don't you get off the bus/why don't you just come back home to us".
This record is the finest thing Lisa Miller has done. It will keep speaking to you, moving you, long beyond this year. It's why it is unquestionably a great album.
These things I know to be true: sad songs make you cry; yearning songs can remind you of what it feels like to hurt; loss is universally understoodand never disappears. And there are always plenty of ballad-heavy albums around that can fulfil the desire to feel or share those emotions. Lord knows I've wallowed in them many a time and will again.
However, the great albums of heartbreak are the ones that invoke a wider and more complex range of emotions incorporating sadness, yearning and loss and also the shared pleasure of memory, the anger of regret, the celebration of minutia (for what are our lives but accumulated minutia?) and the tentative steps into the future.
Good albums do that in the songs; great albums do that at a deeper level, in something beyond words and music. They simultaneously open up an ache and soothe it. That is what Lisa Miller's Morning in the Bowl of Night does.
This is in one sense an album drawn from, and infused with, the death of her mother. But there is so much more to it than that. It's also about adulthood, responsibility and memory, about faith and its substitutes, about laughter and joy. About living. And it's all done with such grace and simplicity, with such intimacy and honesty - lyrical and musical - that it insinuates itself into your life completely.
There are moments of quiet excellence. Such a Find, so airy and delicate, with its 1950s strings and Miller in angelic mode; Lucky Dip Roses, with its mandolin and swaying rhythm underneath Miller's front-of-the-picture vocals; Amused & Confused, with its wry observations of a certain type of pop star appropriately matched with wry banjo.
Then there are songs that are, without even a hint of excess, utterly devastating. Motherless prises your heart open with exquisite gentleness; the lightly skipping Snowman detonates in you hours later. And then there is the willowy Point Ormond, the album's centrepiece.
It begins "it's been six months of a life sentence/and it just keeps getting harder/harder to mention your name" and later tears you up with "I wear your old shirt/shampoo bottle in the shower/kept your last crossword/word of the day was overpowered". But it packs the most velvet-gloved punch in the understated chorus where Miller sings oh, so gently, "why don't you get off the bus/why don't you just come back home to us".
This record is the finest thing Lisa Miller has done. It will keep speaking to you, moving you, long beyond this year. It's why it is unquestionably a great album.