Carol Martini’s new album is dedicated to the memory of her recently deceased mother. With seven of the tracks explicitly annotated as being “written for my Mom” you may expect a pretty bleak listening experience. However, with twenty tracks on offer here, there are plenty of other themes and ideas to grab your attention.
An incredibly critical reviewer could perceive this as failed artistic vision; instead of confronting her grief, Martini appears to scatter clues amongst unrelated ideas. For me, personally, this is how grief works. You can be going about your daily routine when suddenly something seemingly unrelated forces your mind to the place you’ve been avoiding all day. To me it makes perfect sense that Martini can go from a childlike strum about how much she likes cookies and ice-cream (‘Sugar’) to acknowledging “black clouds gather like hungry vultures” (‘You’re The Only One’).
It’s only natural that an event as massive as losing a parent will affect every single aspect of your life. Still, a lot of the songs here don’t offer any biographical reading apart from their immediate subject matter. There’s a song about taking a bath, one about playing in front of empty audiences. Both Halloween and Valentine’s Day get a mention. The main connecting thread between the songs here is that they are completely honest. Some moments are brutally honest, while others seem childlike and naïve. As a result, even in it’s moments of levity this album makes for uncomfortable listening. You feel like you’re pouring over someone’s diary recounting everything from failed relationships to skateboarding. Nothing is filtered.
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However, with a running time of nearly seventy minutes, there’s a hell of a lot of information to take in. As the majority of the songs are light solo acoustic strummed affairs, even after repeated listens, it’s hard to immediately tell them apart. The direct subject matter eventually grabs you but there’s not enough variety to warrant listening to the whole thing in one sitting. You could argue that whimsical numbers about baths, skateboarding and confectionary should stay in the realms of a private joke between friends. It certainly would have helped the flow of the record as a whole. But as an unrelentingly open account of a moment in someone’s life it kind of works.
Whether this is what you want for an album is up to you. I personally find the distance between the album’s private subject matter and its constant accessibility a little too jarring. The fact that you can be tapping your foot and then be forced to confront a desolate image (“I would have made you the biggest welcome home sign”) just leaves me feeling like an inadvertent voyeur. If you want to give it a go, start by investigating piano-led standout track No Wishes.
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