Review Summary: ...cute.
For all the diversity in the world there's still something overwhelmingly pure about songwriting on its most fundamental level. Making use of an acoustic guitar and a voice like Amy Millan's isn't the bravest or most challenging mission statement imaginable, but there's also very little that can go horribly wrong. The Stars vocalist has proven she's more than a talented singer, her tone recalling a more restrained KT Tunstall with far more self-awareness and a world full of beauty; more than that, though, we already know she can write pop songs from her work with Stars and Broken Social Scene. So the question is, what next? 2006's Honey from the Tombs carried a country twist and slid by fairly unspectacularly, however pleasant it was. On
Masters of the Burial there's a more downbeat, indie-pop feel to the soft, dreamy soundscapes, and the country edge is almost entirely absent. And Amy Millan is, as you would expect, brilliant. And that's about it.
There are excellent cuts on Masters of the Burial, for sure. Run For Me is tenderness in music form, soft and pretty inside its picked electric guitar, with a pre-chorus which remembers Candle In The Wind's melody and sounds similarly heartbroken and resigned. Opener Bruised Ghosts and its distant wailing guitars most vividly conjure images of Millan's prolific collaborative work with other Canadian artists, many of whom make guest appearances here, and her cover of Death Cab's I Will Follow You Into The Dark is sweet and optimistic, the only track which carries a tempo anything above
damn slow. But it doesn't stand up to the original's raw emotion, and above all it's still not
riveting. Packed full of enjoyable and beautiful moments, Masters of the Burial suffers from a lack of punch; the melodies are pretty and delicate but rarely despondent enough to evoke a genuine reaction. The violins are upset but never tortured enough to transform a piece from 'sad' to 'distraught', and so on.
It's important to reiterate that Masters of the Burial hardly bores, it just never hits enough heights to impress on a level more than '
awwwh'; even Day To Day's desolate, solitary drumbeat fails to truly set the song apart from its competitors because of the same distant, whispy production that lends itself far too frequently to a loss of momentum or impact. That drumbeat is the only instrumentation in the whole song, and it's fair to say that the tracks here are varied in texture and construction, just not in execution; nothing feels raw enough for its emotion to truly strike a chord, many of the tracks go nowhere and Millan's voice, where usually it would be fired up by electronics or creative indie-pop songwriting, is left to middle-of-the-road pleasant balladry, which she's
good at – Low Sail, Old Perfume and Bound prove so – just not good enough to keep a listener hooked for a full 30 minutes when the direction changes so little. Few are.
So while Masters of the Burial doesn't hurt you or say anything hugely offensive, it's the things it leaves unsaid that disappoint and put a huge cloud over its ethereal beauty. Perhaps it's a lack of ambition, perhaps it's a lack of spark when not co-writing music with somebody else, or perhaps Amy Millan's 2009 record isn't meant to be much more than a sweet, endearing soft indie-pop album with it's gentle high points and very few specific lows. You just get the feeling she's better than both this and Honey from the Tombs, and while Masters of the Burial contains a number of songs that work their way into your brain after a few listens, it's impossible to see it being celebrated as a realisation of potential or anything better than '
awwwh'.
