REB FOUNTAIN RETURNS (2021): Iris in the spotlight

 |   |  3 min read

REB FOUNTAIN RETURNS (2021): Iris in the spotlight

Despite Covid-19 roadblocks – and it being the year of Benee and the Beths – for many 2020 belonged to Reb Fountain.

She was nominated for three music awards (best album, solo artist and alternative artist) and her album, being self-titled, seemed to announce Fountain's emergence as a different kind of artist, and one signed to Flying Nun.

With critically acclaimed previous albums in the broad folk genre, Fountain steadily moved toward nerve-end, intellectual alt.rock via the Hopeful/Hopeless EP and Little Arrows album, both 2017.

Exploring poetic threads from Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen and dark cabaret, her writing deepened, becoming more oblique but innately powerful.

The album's opening line on her 2020 album which won this year's Taite Music Award – “changes, I've made some changes” -- was evident in performance.

Freed of the magnetic field around the microphone stand which grips so many, and often abandoning the protective shield of an instrument, she commanded stages, prowling through the space, occupying the lip in the manner of Nick Cave and, with dramatic gestures, engaged like a performance artist throwing herself into extended treatments of her Silver Scroll-shortlisted Don't You Know Who I Am.

When she performed Hey Mom at Auckland's recent Flying Nun 40thanniversary a woman nearby was overtaken by body-shaking sobs.

https___images.genius.com_36646a2d537d9428dae6600dd9cfd15e.1000x1000x1All of which makes her new Iris one of the year's most anticipated albums from an artist whose lyrics, in the manner of Bob Dylan, may be abstruse on close reading but which add up to something inexplicably coherent.

In that, Iris is a consolidation, yet deeper metaphysical exploration, of territory Fountain has defined for herself.

The opener Psyche begins with funereal piano and mournful cello before her speak-sing poetry unfurls through evocative mythological and feminine imagery.

Here too are understated and beautiful melodies (the elegant Foxbright with its anima spirit image), dreamy chamber-like folk-pop (the dark eddies of Peggy Seeger and Calum MacColl's Swim to the Star about the sinking of the Titanic), and vocal shifts from a conversational whisper alternating with a confident woman on the increasingly dramatic folk-pop of Invisible Man, a song freighted with yearning and need.

IK_REB_FOUNTAIN_MT_16Fountain deploys her signature move between intimate, rhythmic spoken word passages and song, coupled – on the veiled menace and consciousness questioning of Beastie – with a changing perspective between the personal and observational.

Frequently there is breathy sensuality: “We open and close like a perfect ring/throw your head back . . . Your arrow was loose in my heart,” on the ballad Heart. And again on the relentlessly driving pop-rock of Lacuna: “What a way to start, kisses in the dark/You know I can't be whole with the sum of us apart”.

In such songs, Fountain probes beneath surfaces through heightened, analytical dissections of emotions but which remain engaging for their honest expression.

Screen_Shot_2021_09_29_at_9.17.27_AMWith her cracking band of Karin Canzek (bass), Earl Robertson (drums) and multi-instrumentalist Dave Khan, Iris also offers considerable musical range, from the reflective title track to the searing, unnerving central passage of the Fisherman-- its lyric moving between stark realism and the Biblical – which ends in an oppressive soundscape as she cries, “hold back the tide, hold back the tide”.

Iris, full of such layered and passionately resonant songs, will surely provide even more anchoring material for Reb Fountain's compelling performances now touring is an option again.

.

Screen_Shot_2021_09_29_at_9.21.22_AMReb Fountain's Iris is available now on digital platforms and on vinyl through Flying Out.

Iris tour dates

Isaac Theatre, Christchurch, November 25; Glenroy Auditorium, Dunedin, November 27; Opera House, Wellington, December 3; The Civic, Auckland, December 11


Share It

Your Comments

John Donnan - Oct 5, 2021

Judith Baragwanath. Looking good!

post a comment

More from this section   Absolute Elsewhere articles index

THE OUTER LIMITS OF THE HUMAN VOICE: That sound, it haunts me still!

THE OUTER LIMITS OF THE HUMAN VOICE: That sound, it haunts me still!

Blame punk’s redrawing of the map - or Yoko Ono, or the much more irritating Celine Dion if you will -- but the limits of our tolerance to the human voice have certainly shifted over the... > Read more

EDDIE COCHRAN (1956-1960): Live fast, die right

EDDIE COCHRAN (1956-1960): Live fast, die right

When Amy Winehouse died in 2011, few were much surprised that biographies started appearing within weeks. When Whitney Houston died there were no albums of hers readily available in New Zealand... > Read more

Elsewhere at Elsewhere

Niue, South Pacific: Front seat storyteller

Niue, South Pacific: Front seat storyteller

About 90 minutes into our drive around the island – during which he has kept up a running commentary full of digressions into local history and politics, fishing, geology and much more --... > Read more

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . TOMMY QUICKLY: The career that couldn't be created

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . TOMMY QUICKLY: The career that couldn't be created

At the end of '63 the fresh and freckle-faced 18-year old Tommy Quickly was standing at the door of his dreams: he'd been signed by Beatles manager Brian Epstein (who had changed his name from... > Read more