HOLLY THROSBY – NORMAL MAGIC: REVIEW
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HOLLY THROSBY
Normal Magic (Hobbledehoy Records)
IN HER THREE NOVELS, all set in a fictional but physically tangible slice of the world south of Sydney and east of what threatens as unfettered space, Holly Throsby navigates us into and through communities that are no longer thriving but well short of abandoned. Ostensibly mysteries of curiosity, they are at their heart stories of what holds us together when we might otherwise float away. Or maybe they’re about what we look for when we think we’re untethered, by choice or by circumstance.
Actually, when you think about it, those are probably the same thing, a search for connection in essence – not a revelatory theme but vital in its very ordinariness, like the people we meet there. Throsby’s respect for that finds her characters rendered with a tenderness that doesn’t resolve their hurts into some catch-all rescue but places them in a context of maybe not knowing what everything “means” yet realising it matters.
On her first album in nearly 10 years - a deeply satisfying, deeply attractive record - these themes percolate throughout, musically and emotionally.
The sonic atmosphere of Normal Magic, in keeping with the album title, exists in a space between natural and embellished, between organic and electronic, between (her) past and (an undefined but unmistakeable) present that is both special and ordinary. Throsby in the Bardo you might say.
So, there are burbling synthesisers and banjo, electric bass and skimmed drums, bending guitar and plain piano, acoustics and air-filling synthetic beds. To which you can add vocals sometimes enveloped in an almost palpable wrap and other times so clear they almost ring. You never lose the thread to the intimate foundations of her previous albums, which as well as some sublime melodies were built on voice, microphone and her guitar (though never just those elements, nor just her) but this is decidedly different in its shadings of those.
The duality is clear wherever you land, even in the long sigh All Of Our Sorrows which closes the album on a breathy horn sounding its way across the still waters of guitar and gentle nudging bass, reaching to the male and female voices waiting on the far bank. There’s sorrow? There’s hope There’s promise? There’s wishing. “There’s always a feeling of hope in tomorrow/When someone will take away all of my sorrows.”
When Gallery steps lightly in, upfront voice and background piano, the windswept atmosphere and a synth run like a small gallop across the floor make for alternating moodiness and lightness that hover at the edge of Throsby’s precise phrasing. A clip-clop rhythm and upright bass in Tell Me I’m Done hints at a burlap and boots setting that the clean-chord guitar reinforces, but the synthetic horn plays against the finger-picked guitar to put the faintest touch of science atop the natural. Sighing electronics beneath the sea-sway of Hold Please – a sort of duet with the always wonderful Laura Jean that nods to previous duets with the likes of Will Oldham and Mark Kozelek – subtly twist the song, leaning it to the maudlin, but there’s a solidity to the guitar which emerges eventually that holds it firmly to something more nuanced than sad.
Those variations and small deviations from sadness are everywhere on Normal Magic, but then why shouldn’t there be when those feelings are inescapable even in the brightest of times or as the deepest of connections, for lovers and friends and parents? It is possible to be both, or everything, in the one moment: “Hold please/While I come undone/Holding someone I love.”
In the domestic setting of Tell Me I’m Done, Throsby asks “Where is my reverence, I wonder?”, and the little fractures of the situation hold both trust and uncertainty. “I’ll be your one and only/I can’t stop thinking of you/Just put me to bed and tell me I’m done.” Is that neediness or understandable? After all, in the slow turn country title track that follows, Throsby hums a wistful song of pleasures (“You brilliant thing/Just blowing in”) that are nothing but still so potent for their insignificance to others. “Have you done your dancing?/Did you add some colour?/I’ll show you my arm/And probably won’t stop there.”
A song I keep coming back to, trying to nail down exactly what it’s saying to me, is Photoshoot, but I don’t know that I am any closer to explaining it. A photo undertaken; a space left open; a line lightly thrown but aimed with intent; sensuality underpinned by the presence of something like despair just kept quiet; the impossibility of a message but the need to say it nonetheless. “Keep shooting, my love,” she repeats as the song ends, so we do.
Why? Because the connection is there, frayed as it might be, misjudged as it could be? Well, that is both normal and yet magical.
Normal Magic is out tomorrow, September 4
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