RIYL: Fiona Apple, Cold Specks, genre-bending folk

Favourite Tracks:

You can buy 4U right now from Mal Devisa’s Bandcamp page, along with a few other bits and pieces.

P.S. Devisa also records as MAL, which is another direction entirely. Listen below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV6GWUHEBSY

The post Flash Review: Mal Devisa – 4U appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The record opens with ‘the bird’, a song that utilises animal analogies to describe the strange intimate-yet-remote relationship we share with loved ones. “You bring me dead birds and then you go” sings Joseph, “and it sounds like all our lives and it sounds like you do not know me and never will.” The track is both unsettling and comforting in its honesty, facing up to the awful truth that we will always be separate and distinct, even from those we love the most. While this is something that is usually ignored (for the sake of our sanity) or magnified into melodrama (quite probably also for the sake of our sanity), Joseph (paradoxically, I know) lets the listener into her innermost thoughts in a way normally only possible in the strongest, most unflinching of novels.

In this way Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled brings to mind Marilynne Robinson‘s Housekeeping. At various points during the novel the narrator Ruthie finds herself alienated from-/abandoned by her mother and sister and aunt, leaving her alone in the world. Rather than write this as the the usual hard-luck-with-happy-ending Hollywood story, Robinson’s character confronts and travels through confusion and grief and studies them from the other side, coming to appreciate the fragility of human relationships and realise that our desire to maintain them is what makes life so beautiful:

“They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and sooner or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.”  

But before the clarity, Ruthie sees and does a lot of strange things, actions which barely make sense to her or those involved, let alone others around them. You get the impression that the characters are subject to forces larger than themselves, things they are not equipped to understand. With this album, Joseph paints a similar picture by presenting her feelings straight, appreciating their importance without being able to grasp their context, an autobiography that goes beyond superficial times and places. Poetic and strange but never contrived, she appears to be trying to convey something that sits just outside of her view, or else is so large that it is only possible to see a small speck at any given time. What’s more, she seems to realise that what feels vital to her is foreign to others, but, without any other option, strives on regardless, surrendering to a diligent ignorance, a promise to try and to love in a world too detailed and complex to understand.

To write about something so deep requires a skilful balance between the explicit and implicit, lyrical and beautiful yet clear and true. Thankfully, like Marilynne Robinson, Joseph proves more than capable. By knitting together abstract imagery and phrases, she crafts something larger than the sum of its parts, forgoing clear song structure and even good grammar in a way which accentuates the deeply personal feel. “I hear your babys here your babys here your babys hear your babies,” she sings on ‘the blood’, “and the wind will blow and the seed be sown and the made of blood is the only loved.” Every song contains similarly striking language, and Joseph’s voice and melancholy piano make the whole thing creepy in the way that we all secretly think we’re creepy . Take ‘the bone’ for example:

“Under the bird of the prey and black hole made of what will not grow back still and the born of the loved and lost heart hard of stone and mouth of dust you are the bone sticking in my throat”

This is a simple album about things so complicated that it’s almost impossible to put them into words. It’s about those thoughts and feelings that we all experience but never admit, the things that we, be it through etiquette and embarrassment and fear, dare not confess to others or even ourselves. Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled is an album about people: lonely and loved, corporeal and divine, mortal and terrified yet enduring with a resilient hope that never quite goes out.

You can buy Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled now via Bandcamp (and via Hits the Fan Records).

P.S. Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled is up for the Scottish Album of the Year award. Joseph has some stiff competition (we really like The Twilight Sad) but gets the nod from us. You can vote too, so head on over to the website before the polls close at midnight tonight to make sure your favourite (*whispers* Kathryn!) lifts the cup.

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The album, I Predict a Graceful Expulsion, is to be released on May 21st on Arts & Crafts.

As a bonus, a cover of the Swans song ‘Reeling in the Liars’ is to be released for Record store day. have a listen below.

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