Dirt, the new album from US-born, Sydney-based songwriter Ainsley Farrell negotiates a tricky web of situations and emotional states. Anxiety, restlessness, the dead weight of loss. Brushes with toxic masculinity, difficult break-ups and a variety of existential crises. But more than descending into darkness for the sake of it, Farrell processes such experiences as a way of moving beyond them. Take ‘Fireworks‘, a track centring on a specific experience during Fourth of July which moves from sadness and panic towards a sense of release. As we described in a preview, the song “fits into the indie rock lineage of Dacus and Bridgers, confessional in its tone and cathartic in practice, holding up vulnerabilities as a way in which to conquer them.”
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=1400537314 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=1208139431]
Not every song on the record moves in such a clearly affirming direction, but each holds the idea as a possibility even when agency is stripped away. Written while a close friend was dealing with a difficult situation, ‘The Way Back‘ “faces up to suffering with a steely determination,” we we put it previously, “urging anyone struggling to hold on a little longer until the clouds begin to break.” The vulnerability and directionlessness of unguarded opener ‘So Small’ seeks answers to correct the situation, and ‘Dark Spell’ goes as far as to invite pain so as to speed up the process of working through the end of a relationship.
I never took it all too well
You watched me wither
Under your dark, dark spellSo break me and tell me what hurts
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=1400537314 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=2538581029]
Stemming from an all-too common brush with a disrespectful man, ‘Buffet‘ also deals with a sense of powerlessness, though refuses to settle for the usual consequences of such imbalances. “The resulting track simmers with competing energies,” we we wrote in a preview. “The writhing discomfort of the experience matched only by an ever-present anger now brought to the boil.” It’s perhaps the most explicit example of the indignant bite which runs through Ainsley Farrell’s work. Fury as “an attempt to reverse the situation,” as we concluded, “[to] draw power from the music and regain the agency which is chipped away day by day.”
‘Motel 6’ exists within a more nuanced yet no less sticky situation with a man. One where the narrator is unsure whether they want the attention or not. “I saw the smoke from your breath turn to poetry / The light you blew burned through a silence in me,” Farrell sings in her deftly precise manner. “You gave me my first kiss in a Motel 6 / So young just dying to be part of it.” The wistful yet bright closer ‘Oblivion’ rises from amid all of these tales of doubt and darkness, perhaps possessing little by way of answers, but leavened enough by the experiences to float above the tumult and find something like reflection.
If I vaporize before your eyes
Would you cool my molecules as they start to rise?
Watch me shake this cloud is gonna break
See me swirl and let down all my weightDon’t cry I’m moving on
Don’t cry when I’m gone
Dirt is out now and available from the Ainsley Farrell Bandcamp page.