The name Danielle Fricke has popped up on Wake The Deaf quite a bit in the last few months. Back in March we reviewed her beautiful ambient EP Burrow, before sharing a video for the single ‘Cicadas’ and then featuring one of her songs as part of our (ongoing) Quiet, Constant Friends project. In a separate piece about Fricke’s contribution, we explained that ‘The Well’ was taken from an upcoming debut full-length, Moon, a release that is now upon us.
The album opens with ‘Tenterhooks’, an ambient track which swells and simmers like a post-rock song which never quite reaches a climax. Fricke’s vocals arrive in the closing minute, repeating the same line over and over, sounding like a call into fog or else a silent incantation let free into the internal turmoil of the narrator’s mind. The title track follows with an icy stillness, the mist clearing to reveal a stark lunar landscape upon which Fricke lets her words go:
“Let me be your moon
when you go out at night
shine down on you
I’ll change your tide”
It is from here that the album’s themes of loneliness and isolation develop, although quite how appropriate it is that the narrator casts themselves as the moon itself depends on whether or not a distant lump of rock can feel, can dream. Take ‘The Well’ as an example, a song darker still but never barren, desperation and anxiety and human heat cutting through the blackness. Moon is not a happy album, but it is these sparks of emotion that mean it’s never empty either.
The instrumental ‘Yours To The Ocean’ continues the mood, a layered track of ghostly, cinematic ambience and glitchy electronics playing out like the northern lights above an Arctic wind, managing to convey both stillness and anxiety, an internal writhing amidst external inertia. In contrast, ‘Dizzy’ feels like a short spell of audacity, the narrator gathering the courage to speak their thoughts, even if no-one is there to hear them. ” Let me feel love, even pain / whatever you feel, I’ll have the same” Fricke sings, “we can make it, close our eyes / be lovers, give it time”. But if that was an upward spiral then ‘Cicadas’ is a downturn – slower and sadder, it stutters into life with hesitancy, the candid words of ‘Dizzy’ replaced by a wistful melancholy, an animal gripped by pessimism as its genes stir up the unavoidable compulsion to bed down and hide from an approaching cold.
“Let the cicadas sing
bring the heat in.
We’ve only got a few more weeks
till the winter’s here
then I’ll settle in my room
waiting for you”
‘Grey’ is sadder still, a sombre love-story-turned-tragedy in the most human way, the participants speaking and thinking of love’s ephemeral nature during even the most placid of days, anticipating the acceleration or deceleration or cold hard snap that will turn everything on its head. The (mostly) instrumental ‘Heirloom’ plays like a confused dream below a frozen field, a burrow filled with the smell of life and thoughts of another world, while ‘Maisy’ sees the internalised emotion precipitate into something palpable, a desperate attempt to communicate, regardless of whether the words will be heard or not. For all of the love and loss in the poetry of the record, the song possesses a sincerity and vulnerability so far unseen, resorting to the kind of simple phrases used when all else fails.
“If the world is weighing down on your skin
you will be ok and you will let it in
you can make it love
you will be ok
sometimes life just makes you want to throw it away”
In most movies and books, this opening up would be the catalyst for an upturn of fortunes, the ‘bravery’ of speaking earnestly appeasing whatever cosmic forces govern these things and allowing a reunion or something equally happy. Moon does not work that way. ‘Mourning Dove’ feels like the bottom of a trench, a deep but well-lit nadir in which all shock, denial and anger has dissipated to leave a quiet, introspective continuation, where one commits to their grief and loneliness without embarrassment or fear. With its gentle vocals and spectral instrumentation, the track plays like an empty room, maybe the scene of some vital occurrence, a space once important but now still and serene, the past existing in objects left untouched and faint vibrations in the air.
“I mourn the mourning dove
who calls for it’s lost love in the night
there’s not much left in its lungs
not enough light to see the sun
I’m afraid he’s lost this one”
Closer ‘Rabbit’ is a piano-led ballad made intricate by Fricke’s careful, evocative layering, the track morphing near the three minute mark into a swirling blizzard. Somehow all this adds up to something as simple and organic as any live-take folk song, the electronic, orchestral and pop elements fusing into something heartfelt and heartbreaking, an arrangement I don’t remember being done quite so effectively since the early albums from The Antlers. Quite how the story ends is unclear. It could be read as a challenge, a test of faith, or alternatively as a reprieve, but you get the sense that it is actually no conclusion at all, that these are just more thoughts put out into the empty room, words that will be followed by more as the narrator’s heart and head cycle through the gamut of pain and hope we call life.
“From waking, keep me from waking up
say you hate your rabbit
and let it go”
In a world where so much art is geared towards redemption, where no character is complete without a life-changing epiphany and every downward face of Freytag’s pyramid must entail personal change and regrowth, Moon is a lesson in stillness (albeit a frantic, twitching stillness of false starts). Here we have a moment stretched out, questions asked but not answered, a monologue that might never leave the room. The wonder of the album is that the human emotions of love and longing never evaporate, continuing to push through the frost where they are warmed by earthshine, opening up the possibility that the very feelings which caused the pain could be the things which end it. So while the narrator is trapped, they never submit to the vacuous silence of space. Hopes are still hoped and dreams are still dreamed and wishes are cast from cold, cupped hands, skywards.
You can buy Moon on white vinyl now from Porchlight Records. If you are feeling decadent you can buy the ‘Fancy Edition’ (priced at $25) which gets you a limited edition art print and lyric booklet. The vinyl will ship on the 4th December but comes with an immediate download.
