Bright Black Night
by Mystery Waitress
On this Wellington band’s 2020 debut, Nest, singer-writer and guitarist Tessa Dillon distilled the startlingly personal within a larger picture on the insightful internal/external narrative of Khandallah. For this equally fine-focus, intelligent second album, Dillon – with drummer Olivia Campion, bassist Xanthe Rook and James Morgan (synths, guitars) – shifts her ground from gloomy, understated rock (the title track) and poetic folk (Console) to strident guitar-driven pop behind engrossing lyrics (the air-punching of Nightbug and Surfer).
Mystery Waitress know the value of space and sonic understatement as much as overt emotions and cathartic volume.
There’s a visceral sense of place here, notably on the cinematic Mountain “where the air itself sings, up the mountain, the Tararuas”, the lyric pivoting between the real – a friend dying of cold up there – and the metaphorical. And here, too, is self-analysis: “All I need is one good dream to reveal. You conceal the very thing you need to breathe with boys, toys, lies. Wish you could always be a child,” on Nightbug. Dillon hooks you in: the opening lines of the downbeat, medicated mood of Pt 1. Hospital: “Come to see me, hair hidden under your beanie and I’m waking up in this room again …”
And this, on the white-knuckle rock of Pt 2. Tiger which has a similar soul-baring directness as Patti Smith dealing with dreams deferred: “I’m going to the zoo, I’m gonna volunteer there like when I was 19 and bored.” Then it moves the lens: “My baby’s in the next room painting a tiger on the tapestry. We’re painting it for my mother 64 today, 64 years late for her parallel existence where she’s a singer in a witch choir …” Bright Black Night – the title encapsulating the dichotomies in Dillon’s astute, refined lyrics – is a rare one. It rocks as much as it penetrates.
Woodland
by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings
Even in the egalitarian world of Americana, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings are akin to royalty. Unlike early 1960s folk artists seeking authenticity through replication, Welch and Rawlings – who met at Boston’s Berklee College of Music – invigorated the traditional through new songs, so notions of past and present blur.
Woodland, Welch’s first album of new material since 2011, had a troubled gestation: Covid first, then a tornado ripping the roof off their Nashville studio during torrential rain.
Out of adversity, the songs and imagery came: a freight train silhouetted against a blue sky (Empty Trainload of Sky), the sense of loss that comes with change (the string-enhanced What We Had) and a Rawlings tribute to the modesty, emotional support and songwriting of the late Guy Clark on Hashtag: “Singers like you and I are only news when we die.” That song sits between North Country (ageing and the cold climate, with pedal steel) and the pointed The Day The Mississippi Died: “We’ve brokеn what we never knew could break.” Moving harmonies, superb playing and songs like Rawlings’ Dylanesque Turf the Gambler, which may have always existed but required royalty to pluck them from the air.
Both albums are available digitally and on vinyl; Woodland is also available on CD.
