Songs for Peacock, the latest album from Los Angeles-based Tara Jane O’Neil, is a record of both mourning and reconciliation. But then, if to reconcile means to make two opposite situations agree, then perhaps these are the same thing. Finding accord between the past and the present, between presence and absence, or love and suffering. Because to mourn is not to attempt to overcome loss, but integrate into your being.
The multi-instrumentalist and composer has been making music for well over two decades, but this album is Tara Jane O’Neil’s first under her initials, TJO. Still, it very much continues the idiosyncratic and individual vision that has come to mark her oeuvre. Released earlier this month by Orindal Records, the album is a collection of covers traversing the radio smash hits of O’Neil’s youth, a process that began in the aftermath of her brother’s sudden death.
Playing songs from 1983, it turns out, can be a source of comfort amid grief. From Bananarama and Boy George through Leonard Cohen and INXS, Tara Jane O’Neil took a collection of the biggest tracks of the year and began to reimagine them, using bass, electric guitar and simple electronic instruments. “This album is a mixtape, it is homage and it is distortion of sounds that were around in 1983,” O’Neil says, “around the home I shared with my brother Brian.”
Unsurprisingly, the results are not faithful recreations, but they also retain something of the spirit of the originals. There is no irony here, no attempt to transmogrify the feelgood pop energy into absurd reflections of grief. O’Neil pulls some of the tracks spectral thin and diaphanous, gives others a newfound sense of space and weight, but ensures that all have some line back to their own joyful history. A reconciliation between the sad, weird present and its own happy past. And, furthermore, the realisation that no line divides them. That things have always been sad and weird and good, and likely always will.
‘Crying Game’ sees its richer hues stripped away, the TJO take like a Polaroid of the original, cracked and faded and full of the fondness of a found thing, while ‘Cruel Summer’ is the desert twin of its urban counterpart—Bananarama’s playful bounce now just a shimmering mirage on the horizon. Cohen’s knowing croon on ‘Everybody Knows’ is rendered similarly ghostlike, Duran Duran’s ‘The Chauffeur’ given a devotional light, but the peculiar thing is not what feels different about these songs, but what stays the same.
For each track is familiar, as though hits of a certain size are spells unbroken by meddling. Spells designed to worm their way into our brains and lie dormant. “Pop music is sticky,” O’Neil says. “It can stick on you for 30 years without you knowing. It can stick you right back into a room or a car. Commercial radio is powerful like smell.” Take ‘Happy House’, announcing itself as the Siouxsie And The Banshees classic from the first peals of guitar, as though it has been sitting with you all along, waiting to be activated by a handful of notes.
But what Tara Jane O’Neil makes clear across the record is that pop music can do more than merely persist. Through some witchcraft, it begins to preserve that around it too, as though charged by fate or happenstance to protect the conditions in which it first emerges. Pop music as an embalming mechanism, a process of fossilisation. A medium in which life can be trapped, outside of time and space. Songs for Peacock is not some lesson in sugary nostalgia, no longing glance into the utopian past. For there is no past, certainly no utopia, just life as it was lived and these songs that still encode it.
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Songs for Peacock is out now via Orindal Records and you can get it from the TJO Bandcamp page.
