All Day Venus

Adalita’s second album outside of Magic Dirt celebrates not just painful experience but living through it to tell the tale, writes PATRICK EMERY.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] “This lady spoke to us about music today,” remarked our nine-year-old son last year, apropos of the school day’s events. “She was in a band called Magic something ... Magic Dirt, I think it was, and she had a kind of different name – Adalita,” he added, before handing over the latest edition of the school newsletter.

In amongst the principal’s cheery summary of recent events, and advertisements for upcoming sporting events, fundraising activities and secondhand household items was the announcement of an upcoming parental seminar on resilience – that increasingly hackneyed buzzword used ubiquitously in every children’s pop psychological program. (The perverse irony is by removing every instance of potential physical or psychological danger in the school environment, resilience is, at very best, learnt by radical exception. But that’s another story.)

The serendipity of the coincidence of the two events only became apparent in hindsight. Adalita knows a thing or two about resilience – far more, you suspect, than someone invoking the latest round of psychological jargon to a room full of earnest parents and largely disinterested children.

Adalita is one of contemporary Australian rock ’n’ roll’s survivors: back in the day, Magic Dirt was a fearsome and volatile force. (Bruce Milne’s description in Craig Mathieson’s The Sell In of Magic Dirt’s accidental efforts at countering the band’s burgeoning popularity is particularly resonant.) In an industry notorious for chewing up and spitting out talented artists, Adalita has stood her ground – resilient to a fault. On All Day Venus, Adalita bares her emotional scars for all to hear.

The album opens in confrontational style. Fuelled by a dirty guitar riff straight from Adalita’s Detroit-via-Geelong rock heritage, ‘Annihilate Baby’ is laced with retributive rhetoric: “I’ve been way too generous/You should be under arrest/for your unbridled contemptuousness.”

“A romantic battle has been fought, and there’s substantial damage.”

In many ways, it’s this track that sets the scene for the rest of the record: a romantic battle has been fought, and there’s been substantial direct and collateral damage; yet Adalita is still standing. ‘I Want Your Love’ is an elegant pop song (with shades of The Motels) that walks the line between frustration and lingering attraction: “But I know if I let you/even with the best of intentions/We all know how these things go.”

On ‘Warm Like You’, the mood is equivocal: “I was born cold/No, not evolved/I’ll never be warm like you.” Adalita’s vocals are laced with affection; the LA rock punch suggests it’s not all hugs, kisses and red roses. ‘Trust is Rust’ opens a small wound for cursory observation and exposes a festering sore of anger borne of duplicity: trust, it is said, takes a lifetime to build and a moment to lose.

The title track is the soundtrack to reflection: “I sit on a wick/Combing my hair out.” Bad shit’s gone down, and the gloss of love has given way to the scungy residue of failed romance. Yet this is no torch song of resignation; in the last few lines (“Do you adore me/Do you give birth/Do you make the earth turn for me”) Adalita signals her resilience in the situation into which she’s fallen.

‘He Wrote’ is perhaps the most touching song on the album. Eschewing the classic 4/4 rock beat for something approaching a waltz, it’s a tale of a break-up conducted by letter (thankfully not, as things sometimes happens these days, via social media and truncated text messages).

On ‘Blue Sky’ the tempo is upbeat: it’s a pop song with more guts and determination than Ron Barassi’s North Melbourne in its 1970s halcyon era: “Gonna run like a dream/and split from the team/And tell everybody what a motherfucker you’ve been.” It’s ‘fuck you’ with melody; it’s ‘get fucked’ with a smile. That was then and this is now, motherfucker.

Yet ‘Too Far Gone’ suggests an element of bravado might be in the air. It’s reserved and unsure, and the metaphors might be cutting closer to the bone than we’d care to think: “Make it out like you don’t care I know you do/Need a little fix/I’ll be a little fix for you.”

‘Homesick’ sounds like it’s recorded out the back of the studio with Adalita just strumming away to her stream of consciousness, contemplating what happens from here as the dust settles and new paths are drawn. It’s prophetic but still slightly affectionate: “You’re gonna feel homesick/When I get word of it/It’s gonna be quick/Like the setting sun.”

“It’s so sombre, it almost hurts – and that’s just from a distance.”

On ‘Ego’, Adalita turns the spotlight on herself, suggesting that – as is so often the case – that it takes two to tango, and maybe a strong sense of self can have its own unintended negative consequences: “Everywhere you go I go/I’m so in love with my ego.” ‘Heavy Cut’ is everything the title promises: this is the story of the final goodbye, raking over the coals of the good, the bad and the dysfunctional of the relationship. When the swirling guitar riff rolls in, the emotional pain is palpable.

Finally, there’s the next day: on ‘Rolled in Gold’ the bond has been broken and love has been replaced by contrived anonymity: “And you will survive/And we will be strangers/And you will survive this/And we will be strangers.” It’s so sombre, it almost hurts – and that’s just from a distance.

There is a school of thought that says great art only comes from painful experience; certainly there’s plenty of empirical evidence to support that. All Day Venus isn’t just a tale of love gone wrong: it’s the soundtrack to emotional resilience.

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‘All Day Venus’ is out now through Liberation.