MELODY POOL – OUR ETERNAL GARDEN: REVIEW

Bernard Zuel
Aug 12
4 min read

MELODY POOL

Our Eternal Garden (Independent)

IN ITS PAIN AND ITS ATTRACTIVENESS – because whatever else you take from it, this is such a deeply pleasing record to listen to – here is an album that holds two things to be equally true, or that two contradictory thoughts can co-exist, must co-exist: going on is impossible; going on is worth trying.

Throughout Eternal Garden, Pool explores the disorientating nature of sadness that is more than unhappiness, grief that is more than loss, and the way the simple act of existing at the same time as them crushes. It’s conscious and unconscious, thought-through but not controlled or easily dismissed: as she sings in Fantasy Girl, “I do not have these vices to depend on/I am calm and present in my mind”, and this feels both a burden – most definitely a burden – and a kind of saving grace.

In Changing she begins singing “Darling I wake up with the desperate anguish/Darling, I fall asleep with the deep despair/I feel insane inside when you up and vanish/I feel insane inside even when you’re there,” and it feels unvarnished, yet not loose. Yes, “I am a slave to all my deepest fears,”, but for better or worse she knows it, can count its losses and the steps to it.

Importantly we are hearing it in an almost brisk rolling of piano and backing vocals like solid-state ghosts, not weighed down at all but carrying us along with her as if this the drag is only part of the story. That’s why when she says “While the scent of you is whistling through my sorrow/Telling me there is always tomorrow, for changing” you can hear not just a clinging to hope but the traces of belief in that hope. How can that be when “even the buzzing in my head is tired”? Well, she is wired in “To all of your energy surging within me/All of your energy dancing within me“, and maybe that will do to start.

To be fair, the positive rhythmic momentum of Changing is not common across Our Eternal Garden, though Myriad’s southern soul-laid across-Nick Drake circa Five Leaves Left can sweep you along as much as the sly bite in the lyrics, and – on the too little used Australian 1970s cinema scale of analogies – the urgent chorus of Will Not Let You Down is a bridge from some kind of Picnic At Hanging Rock ethereal to the song’s more earthy, Scobie Malone denouement.

Usually though, Pool’s settings fall between a kind of charged English folk and intense, slowed down Sharon Van Etten, most clearly in Unbreakable Chain’s escalating mingling of pretty and prodding and Fantasy Girl’s romantic bent sliding between the bars of emotional gaol, but also in the way the title track plucks strings forwards and backwards, layers voices, and keeps a patina of unease.

All of those become almost irrelevant in My Tender Memory, an unsparing and yet tender collection of memories that can no longer be accumulated, accompanied by piano and guitar that slip in and out focus in your consciousness. “I miss talking to my dad” it begins, “Miss him talking to me”, and for the next four minutes and 20 seconds it remains just as lyrically unadorned and emotionally as unprotected. There is no attempt to soften the absence with platitudes of holding the thought and therefore her father close etc; the memory remains but so does the huge gulf of that absence.

Removing any doubt that Pool isn’t here for the comforting, no matter how pretty the sounds, the album closes with the bullshit-free This World which opens with “I have nothing but numbness now/This world has driven me into madness I cannot defend”, and does not find salvation at any point in its journey. And yet this isn’t dispiriting. Partly that is because musically it is easy to listen to, even if lyrically it is anything but: a jazz-tinged liquid guitar line, a gospel chorus and brushstrokes of strings beguile and soothe, the tempo is almost a lullaby, and the voice remains firm but still vulnerable.

Most of all though, it just says in its own Beckett-ish way, this has been impossible, and yet I am here; I can’t go on, and I go on.

Superstar Of A Shitty Year: How Melody Pool Dreamt Her Way Out Of Trouble: interview

Fantasy League Footfalls – Melody Pool Steps Back Into The Game: interview

Sharon Van Etten – Remind Me Tomorrow: album review

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Melody Pool plays:

Dashville Skyline Festival, October 4

The Cordial Factory, Grenfell, October 18