The fourth album by Exeter-based duo Abbe Wood and Hannah Walker takes their acoustic blend of folk and pop to the next level with a wider, more sophisticated and deeper musical scope, albeit perhaps at the cost of immediately catchy melodies and hooks, although they do imperceptibly pull you in. As The Other Me suggests, questions of self-discovery, transformation and identity loom large, kicking off with the handclaps, background drone and the powerful lead and harmonies of ‘Who You Are’ that, opening with the manifesto “it’s not how you walk, it’s who you are”, addresses being comfortable with yourself as you age rather than worrying about society’s body image pressures (“The television tells me to keep looking younger/The mirror always yells my truth…I want to hold the face of the old me/And tell her not to fear this change/Beauty can lie in the way that you hold her, and to hold her is a beautiful thing”).
The theme continues into the more up-tempo ‘Chasing Skies’ with its staccato propulsive percussion intro that celebrates how the lines on your face and body tell your story (“this everchanging skin, show maps from where I’ve been”) and to embrace the growing years and live in the moment rather than trying to hold on to the illusions of youth (“we’re all growing older So the more that I hold here/Will stop me from folding… I’d love to keep chasing but know I’ll never ever see it again/The more time that we’re losing is proving nothing is to keep in the end”) and that if “time is just borrowed” you need to “figure ways to live, choose who to spend it with” and catch enough joy “to stay on our feet”, the number ending with the wisdom that “when I look back on those years, rose tinted glasses blurring tears/Still know I wouldn’t swap these lines/To blindly keep on chasing skies”.
Wood on guitar and Walker on echoey electric piano, the slow swaying ‘Infinite Kindness’ speaks to parenthood and all its joys and relationship challenges and changes that accompany it (“we took a breath and dived right in/You were braver than I knew you’d be/Held me so that I could see/Then just what this life is for”), along with the strength to overcome and endure (“I know you’ll hold on for our beautiful son/And you’ll find the strength from somewhere/And he’ll grow up stronger than the both of us bursting with a heart of love/And he will feel what I feel from you…he will know/Just what his worth is/I know, he’ll overflow with infinite kindness”).
Returning to themes of transition and transformation, the folksier-styled title track reflects on the different people we are at different times in our lives as we seek to reconcile past and present personas (“Her toys fill every corner and the corners of my mind/Start to cast aspersions on who it was who chose this time”), acknowledging the anxieties (“I’m too afraid to lift this rock for the fear if what I’ll see/It’s too big a room to enter, too vast a sky to stand beneath”) but declaring “I’ll throw my heart open, our life will be more than it’s ever been/When I’m afraid in the dead of the night I’ll dare to admit my decision was right/ I’ll let go of the enemy” , building a life “within these four walls/And we’ll keep building bricks on this floor/Here we are changing the game/Oh but my dreams are the same”.
Taken at a mid-tempo lolloping pace and reminiscent of Thea Gilmore, ‘Ungoverned’ has a powerful a lyric manifesting the pain of betrayal and frustration, the lines “I can see you’re behind the screen, so cowardly collecting dreams/You had 3 weeks to tell us your plans… you chose to withhold/While I had to seek them from under your hand/To find you so cold… You threw us over/ Into the lions/You couldn’t care for closure, so you shut your eyes” clearly bitterly alluding to what one suspects might be connected to the nature of the music industry (“My instincts told me that you were wrong, you’d never ask or think to listen to our song, we were grateful for what/For you lining your pocket, two shots you took with a midnight bullet/You stood on our shoulders to see the land and stepped over that wall/Never thinking to turn and to offer your hand, you allowed us to fall …we thought you viewed us equally/We worked so hard to feed us 3,but now you’ve shown your hand of greed”). It’s also probably the only song I know of to include the word feculent.
The way grief and loss can paralyse underpins the poignant strummed ‘The Part Where You’re Gone’ (and here they sound like a less thunderous Amy Macdonald), neatly captured in the line “how can we just continue on a wheel that doesn’t turn?”, but with the realisation that this will pass and give way to the memories that comfort (“The days move on, the sun returns/You’re in my blood/You’re in my bones/You’re in my being/You’re in my home/And when I’m driving I’ll put on your song/I’ll turn it up the tears will fall/I know that I will never be alone”).
If that’s guessingly about the loss of a parent, the gentle, soaringly sung piano ballad ‘Tao’, one of the rare occasions where Wood plays electric rather than acoustic, is about the loss of a pet that afforded emotional rescue (“You came from nowhere, when I was broken/You pulled me out with every step/Showed me how to reconnect when I was frozen, so unspoken”) a la ‘A Dog’s Purpose’.
Again playing on the theme of self-transformation, Dave Draper’s drums providing the bedrock, the mental health-themed ‘Coming Back’ has an anthemic Celtic feel to a lyric about finding yourself again after being lost in the void (“however I tried, I couldn’t reach for the light/In my reflection today, I saw the spark in her eyes”) and understanding “that water will rise but still I know it will fall”.
Spelling out the album’s overarching theme in its title, ‘Things Change’ with its steady rhythm and almost psychedelic swirl is about the inevitability of growth, whatever discomfort and anxieties may accompany it (“things change but I want things to remain the same/We grew holding on to the life we knew/It’s all we know/My only fear is that you might grow out of these shoes/They keep me walking next to you”) and the realisation that while there may be no certainties “happiness is the basic stuff and deep down we both know this” and “who we are will remain the same”.
The way we can allow others to define who we thing we are is at the heart of the jaunty, pizzicato rhythm ‘Sacred Dreaming’ (“I judged my worth on your intent/I used to wait for days to be my best for you to turn up just in case”), and how figures from the past we thought we’d banished from our minds return to haunt our dreams and “terrorise my peace” as they niggle away at self-confidence and self-image, the notion of sacred dreaming being used to exorcise the demons.
The Other Me aptly comes to a close, again with piano and electric guitar with ‘To The End’, a final encapsulation of the importance of letting go and freeing ourselves from the fetters of the past and the illusions that sought to blind us and plant self-doubt on a journey towards embracing who we are and who we’ve become because “sometimes all we need is age to rid the thing that makes us fade” as it resolves “I know that I’ll get there/ I’ll fight till I bet on my life that we go all the way…we choose what deserves us, pursue what conserves us to carry us through to the end”.
In mythology, sirens were half-female creatures who used their alluring voices to draw those who heard them to their doom. If listening to this outstanding album means your fate is to be forever intoxicated by the duo, then you really should embrace it.
Mike Davies
Artists’ website: www.soundofthesirens.co.uk
‘The Part Where You’re Gone’ – official video:
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