Review Summary: midwife crisis
This is a heartbreakingly, painstakingly produced album. It’s trapped. And, when the atmosphere of dream-pop -- which evokes a kind of limbo -- is rudely interrupted by a volley of shoegaze distortion, it sounds like it’s lo-fi music desperately trying to escape its own parameters. The woman behind Midwife, Madeline Johnston, sounds at points like she’s attempting to emulate Grouper's Liz Harris: these tones are stunning and cavernous and patient, but they’re occasionally at odds with each other. The crunchy power chords are followed, stalked, by layers of reverb that decay before they can ever catch up to the source. It recalls what I think this record revolves around: an artist keeping herself at arm’s length from her past, writing to keep her feet from the mud. You know -- light-hearted fun; carefree and careless.
And this is a heartbreakingly, painstakingly written album. The music swells at the centre of Johnston’s lyrical conflicts, toppling weight on top of these conceits to see how much they can hold. It’d be a struggle to argue cliché here; the crescendos are often unannounced, sweeping in during the middle of a song before dissipating. We hear flashes during the ‘chorus’ of
Song For an Unborn Sun (“run, run, run”), and then we’re met with the real thing:
”Why can’t you see me?”, effectively, breaks me. As the overdrive knots itself up with a cutesy synth melody, Johnston pushes to make her voice rise above the detritus. It still gets a little bit lost. I think that’s the point.
The record isn’t wistful. Rose-tinted glasses are crushed under a tattered heel and nostalgia is broken; instead of remembering the pleasant moments, Johnston traces her deterioration back to the moments where it began. In
Name, she murmurs: “
when you walk away” -- it’s not ‘if’ because, to her, this has happened before and it’ll happen again. That’s the scariest thing about a cycle: what if I resign myself to it.
These songs already cling to me like we both depend on each other. They are scared of being left alone and I am happy for the company, the warm waves of decaying tape that reach back years in the past.
Like Author, Like Daughter could be about anything: a person, a feeling, a place -- but that dying mattress adorning the cover speaks to the space in between the old home and the new one. It's a focal point because, even as Johnston moves on with her life, there are parts of it she can't let go of, as ugly and useless as they may be. You could call this dream-pop, but it's so real it hurts.
