9 Classic Tracks

On her second solo full-length, Sarah Mary Chadwick doesn't waiver in her devastating outlook. Review by ANNIE TOLLER.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

In a 2012 feature for the blog No Pants, Sarah Mary Chadwick offered a revealing description of a song by the American artist Thalia Zedek, a work almost as roughshod and melancholic as her own. “It’s resigned and lost sounding,” she wrote, “it doesn’t know its place in the world. But it’s trying.” The song, ‘Back To School’, is abrasive in its honesty. It might seem overearnest if Zedek’s tone wasn’t so bitten and resigned. Chadwick continued: “This kind of really bald, guileless songwriting is hard to listen to, ‘cause it doesn’t allow for you to rationalise – it’s irrational and stubborn, and these are all reasons to like it.” A more fitting analysis of Chadwick’s own music would be difficult to come by.

"9 Classic Tracks is an invitation to intimacy, both generous and bracing."

For 10 years, in a nomadic existence that took her from Wellington to Melbourne, London and back again, Chadwick was the face of Batrider – a Kiwi outfit with a rotating lineup that featured, over the course of its lifetime, Twerps guitarist Jules McFarlane and Stephanie Crase of Summer Flake. Their music, though noisy, is a downer – it gives the impression of someone being dragged underwater. While the band effectively convey that sense of disillusionment and desperation, beneath this loping, caustic rock the vulnerability of Chadwick’s lyrics is often obscured. As a solo artist, however, she lets these sentiments rise to the surface, unencumbered. Chadwick’s first release under her own name, Eating For Two, was a collection of damaged guitar pop grieving an intimate relationship that had animated her 20s, including the years spent on the road with Batrider. The album’s arrangements were sparse and raw, foregrounding Chadwick’s songwriting with scarcely a drumbeat to break the flow. Her voice sounded flayed and on edge – as uninhibited and unhinged as the earliest Cat Power records.

For the next three years, Chadwick released little else. (Hit And Miss, a compilation of demos and B-sides, appeared late last year, documenting some of the work she produced in the intervening period). Perhaps the most remarkable thing about her follow-up LP, 9 Classic Tracks is how little Chadwick’s outlook seems to have changed. The songs, once again, are devastating, their pace funereal. Her sound, in contrast, has changed plenty. The stark guitar tones that defined her music for nearly 15 years have been replaced almost entirely by droning synths and a crackling organ. The reason for the choice was, in part, circumstantial: “I found myself living in a house with a big old organ which set the tone and demanded use”.

9 Classic Tracks was produced by Geoffrey O’Connor, and the glistening coldness of his recent New Romantic posturing certainly figures here. O’Connor also provided some of the drum programming – another new addition to Chadwick’s sound – that ticks insistently beneath the meandering keys. This intervention, though, provides little genuine movement. The only thing that really does is Chadwick’s vocals. Looped and echoing, her voice tumbles over itself, shading her lines with ghostly whispers and harmonies that hover, birdlike, above the morass.

Chadwick tends to compose in unconventional, spiraling structures. Most songs on 9 Classic Tracks churn ominously at the outset – almost choking – then, finally, they bloom. Album highlight ‘I’m Like an Apple with No Skin’ opens like a dirge, with grimy chords swirling beneath lines like, “I’m at a point and you’re in the air / Screaming out”. Then, unexpectedly, it lunges upwards into the record’s most cathartic moment: a coda that builds over four minutes of sweet relief.

“I’m not much for small talk,” Chadwick told me, via email. “I try and have a clear line between my heart and my mouth”. Since she started releasing solo material, a lot has been said about Chadwick’s confessional style. Her music, like that of Xiu Xiu or Erika M. Anderson, is often startling in its visceral translation of psychic pain – swelling with images of scars, blows and broken skin. (This brutality makes it into her artwork, too. The sordid, NSFW watercolour she created for the album sleeve has been replaced by the back cover on both iTunes and Spotify).

“I’m at the mercy of the world”, Chadwick sings at the album’s midpoint – in one of several demonstrations of what seems to be a staunch fatalism. Across the album, you’re left with the impression she’s been struggling along the same agonising path since childhood. (She grew up an outsider in the tiny mountain town of Taumaranui – a place she calls “the epicentre of my pain”). The grim determinism of 9 Classic Tracks is balanced sporadically by attempts, however futile, at self-assertion: “Until the grave I’m fighting / Wishing that I was dead and I’m fighting / … Never even getting a chance and I’m fighting”.

From time to time these efforts pay off, with Chadwick discovering what looks like a real human connection – tentatively at first, on the self-abnegating ‘Am I Worth It’, and then more tangibly on love song ‘Aquarius Gemini’. By the album’s end there’s even a faint promise of contentment, as Chadwick, reaching delicately for a high note, sings “now I’m thinking I could die happy”. Moments like this are rare on 9 Classic Tracks. More often Chadwick’s optimism is like that of the gospel singer, whose comfort comes from the knowledge that, ultimately, suffering will end with the embrace of God, in Paradise.

The gloom that darkens the record is multiplied by the songs’ weary pace. Chadwick’s organ can’t match the momentum achieved on Eating For Two by simply strumming a guitar, and the metronomic ticking of drum presets never quite regains that lost tempo. The challenge is overcome on a few occasions through sheer good songwriting – most notably in 9 Classic Tracks’ sparkling mid-section: the strange church music of ‘Same Old Fires’; the lovely second single, ‘I’m Back Where I Was’; ‘Aquarius Gemini’, the album’s only guitar-led track; and the climactic ‘I’m Like An Apple Eith No Skin’.

While Chadwick, with wry wit, touts her new album as a classic, it was never really intended to please a wide audience. Instead, 9 Classic Tracks is an invitation to intimacy, both generous and bracing. As Chadwick once wrote of Zedek’s song, ‘Back to School’, “it’s so direct, you can’t argue with it.” This music is hungry, unapologetic and, in its honesty, absolutely trusting. You could just turn away, of course; these aren’t sounds for everyday listening. The better option, though, would be to give back – to step inside Chadwick’s head for a while, amongst the lonely pictures she’s drawn and redrawn, and hear this quiet mess shift, reverberate and untangle.

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9 Classic Tracks is out now through Rice Is Nice.