Review Summary: The artist, the listener, and the occasional in-between.
Love is not strictly limited to the rose-colored lens of a Hallmark motion picture. As many across all of human history could testify, it is not always a simple, anticipated meeting of alike individuals that happened to be in the perfect place at the perfect time. Plenty of occasions feature not an elegant touch of hands or delicate embrace, but a fiery, forceful, perhaps accidental collision of two spiraling fates, their wayward trajectories slamming into each other in a vibrant explosion. The act of love appears as a wreckage wherein the battered passengers must venture to pick up the pieces and rebuild what they were, taking parts from each other, their identities suddenly intertwined. And that wreckage transforms into a burial ground for those troubles to lie in—the factors that propelled that crash in the first place. It’s as unfortunately unexpected as being at the same bar at the same time, reeling from some sort of invisible blow. It’s as simple at offering to buy a drink, then two, then more, and then your feet are flying out the door and into the nearest hotel room. This frantic escalation rings throughout the halls in the tumultuous “Farewell Wanderlust,” the ebb and flow of a piano punctuating the harmonizing male and female vocals as string arrangements soar in the background, their potent strikes coloring the chaos of the scene and its simultaneous beauty. The two characters in this riotous tale of loss turning into love and loss again cry out their grievances:
She laments, “I’m the heartbreak that aches far too much to be shown / All those letters unsent and that garden ungrown / I’m the captain of courage you’ve eternally lacked / I’m the Jesus of wishing to Christ he’ll come back.”
Her counterpart, equal in his concealed hurt, quite nearly shouts, “I’m the face that stares back when the screen goes to black / When your mum says ‘you look healthy’ but you know she means you got fat / I’m the tales that the guests will applaud and believe / I’m the child that you just didn’t have time to conceive.”
In the midst of this operatic musicianship and poetic lyricism, there appears a distance; Joey Batey and Madeleine Hyland have the audience at an arm’s length, inviting them to a show to sit in the seats as they reside on the stage, the listener content with enjoying the spectacle of the instrumental crescendo guided by acoustic strumming. This same sensation permeates the initial tracks to sophomore effort
The Horror and the Wild. The record’s introduction is nothing more than Batey’s voice reduced to a near whisper, an ominous growl of static swallowing the bleak atmosphere. At the flip of a switch, the album plunges into its eponymous creation, an explosion of bass, cello, violin and acoustics echoing like the entrance to a Renaissance faire. Hyland and her comrade in crime engage in a series of vocal trade-offs, combined phrases, and a powerful refrain, the range of both contributors traversing from quieted utterances to resonating baritone and alto notes. It’s all very exhilarating in its presentation, certainly possessing the potential to prompt compulsory singing to the anthemic chorus. Yet again, however, a reserved quality exists—a space between the life of the individual, the product, and the artist. All three elements are separated by enigmatic prose and pristine production. One gets a sense of the narrative hinted at when regarding the arresting ugliness of love through passages a la “We’re drunk but drinking, sunk but sinking / They thought us blind, we were just blinking / All the stones and kings of old will hear us screaming at the cold.” Passion is abound in every word, but that invisible barrier is in place; things are perhaps too textbook and too calculated, preventing the heart of this love story to open up beyond its polished cover.
The second half of the release bears witness to a spontaneous plunge into uninhibited honesty. Much like how “The Rockrose and the Thistle” creeped into existence with a cold disposition, its message barricaded behind threatening ambiance, “Fair” slowly comes to life in the wake of the destruction demonstrated in “Farewell Wanderlust.” Batey is almost entirely by himself once more, his normally commanding vocals transformed into a soft, gentle sound, every progression to a higher tone showcasing cracks in the performer’s façade; he occasionally comes close to stumbling, his vulnerability on full display. String components, previously bombastic, are now restrained behind graceful guitar thrumming; they do not conceal
The Horror and the Wild and don’t buttress its inhabitants as they play above the audience. The stage is instead emptied, and Batey suddenly situates himself next to the listener, his speaking transformed into sentences that require no analyzation or invite ambiguity over their purpose.
“And calm throughout his melodrama she will turn and say ‘dear heart It’s me, it’s me / You don’t need to pretend to be someone you’re not / Cos it’s not like I’ve never heard you fart and snore / And for some god forsaken reason I’m still here love like I’ve always been before / And he’ll say
It’s not fair, It's not fair how much I love you / It’s not fair cos you make me weep when I’m just trying to watch The Office with my yoghurt / And she’ll say / Oh how, oh how unreasonable / How unreasonably in love I am with everything you do / I’ll spend my days so close to you cos if I’m standing next to you then maybe everyone will think I’m cool.”
A mile-wide contradiction erupts as “Fair” fades out of the speakers: The Amazing Devil is tip-toeing a line between absolute detachment—the separation of the art from its author and its appreciator—and uncomfortable sincerity in a manner similar to emo albums—a reference to the genre’s frequent usage of straightforward verses that are practically nauseating in their genuine nature. With the exception of the barrage confined in “That Unwanted Animal,” its rambunctious configurations and authoritative female singing highlighting the talent and charisma of Hyland, the rest of the disc continues this motif of the artist and the listener as one and the same. It harkens back to what was stressed in the stanzas populating the title track which are dripping with resentment, the sugary-sweet innocence of “Wild Blue Yonder,” and that ill-fated rendezvous at a bar counter. Those thunderous drums were warning signals while the melancholic, at times overdramatic, violin, cello and bass passages embodied the lurking pain that was getting closer and closer to the surface.
There lingers doubt around every corner, within every moment of quiet where things reveal themselves as they are: A mess of discarded, broken metal fragments, their frames twisted into a construction far from structurally sound. Yet, be it for that coincidental, passionate encounter that sparked the now rampant desirability; or a sense of belonging now that another struggling heart can hear and understand; or those small, almost-annoying details that demonstrate attraction at its most honest, the relationship is made to continue kicking and screaming.
The Horror and the Wild is composed of the shards of plates flung at walls when such shoddy workmanship begins to crumble. Album finale “Battle Cries” does not reconcile the hero and the heroine; rather, they depart, understanding their mutual faults and their growing incompatibility. Clambering on top of rising instrumentation and a backing choir, one final declaration is made to leave everything behind. Depressive as that may be, Batey leaves the listener with one last bit of earnest expression before departing back to the stage he came from:
“All it took to unearth in the dust and the dirt / Some release or respite from the heat and the hurt / Was taking the time now and then to ask how I am.
And now at the end, at the end of all things / I’m not going to scream, beat my chest at the wind / I’m doing fine."
These are sections of a story that begins with loose ends and somehow ends with more—it’s not possible to tell if this resolution is faux-optimism or a believable objective to keep one’s head up. Despite that, or potentially because of that exact observation, it is an album that is gorgeous for its revelry in the ordinary, extraordinary, and at times brutally realistic.
The Horror and the Wild toys with its strings and dual vocal approach, though its core is undeniably something more authentic than its exterior portrays.
