Graham Reid | | 1 min read
In late 2019 when expat Miriam Clancy returned from her Pennsylvania home of five years to promote her third album Astronomy, she was a very different artist than the singer-songwriter of previous albums.
Astronomy was abrasive electropop-cum-Goth rock, and solo on stage she hammered foot pedals in an extraordinarily physical performance.
“I got really frustrated with the acoustic thing, which I love and will be incorporating again,” she told us at the time. “[But] I heard people saying there were too many women acoustic singer-songwriters in New Zealand, and I was like, 'Yeah, okay. But that's not all I can do'.”
That disruptive album allows her new Black Heart to engage with a subtle return to acoustic folk (the dreamy whisper of Cassowary and Death Becomes the Maiden), yet also reach back further to formative influences on the moody, 80s metal-rock of Kamikaze Angels which alludes to current rabbit-holes of emotional isolation: “So many voices talk like they’re right beside you, but you’re on your own”.
Recently Clancy has had a high-profile presence on social media revealing uneasy truths about her family, presenting herself as an ingenue or damaged Goth bride and placing dramatic videos for these songs, most recently the title track dedicated to two great-uncles killed in WWI.
On an often cathartic album, Clancy addresses the suicide of an uncle who lost his air-hostess wife in the Erebus disaster (the emotionally raw and moving Roelof) and – on the strident, declamatory rock of Velveteen about her childhood abuse – openly offers, “I am a remnant, a seed of salvage . . . I've been abandoned”.
Such threads and themes can be uncomfortable.
But what carries the album are her vocal power and range, a potent sincerity and its broad palette – from Head Like a Hole's stadium-shaped guitar rock, Fleetwood Mac pop-rock on the dark Feels Like Heaven to the seductive True-ish Love – which she confidently claims with this challenging reinvention.
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Elsewhere has a number of album reviews and interviews with Miriam Clancy starting here. There is also an audio culture profile here.
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You can hear and buy Black Heart at bandcamp here or find it at Southbound Records here
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