Will Varley – The Hole Around My Head
Yellow Cake – 22 October 2021
The follow-up to 2018’s Spirit Of Minnie finds Will Varley in stripped-back mode, predominantly accompanied by just acoustic guitar occasionally coloured by electronic touches, the vocals treated with reverb. The opening track, Somer’s Town, begs comparison with Springsteen’s Nebraska as he sketches “Broken windows and red wine”, a fractured relationship (“she was never the same after she found God/I remember the fire in her brain/I was never the same after Chicago”), the memories that remain (“She rents a room inside my thoughts/And comes to stay this time of year”) and the aftermath (“There’s a strange man lives in my house/Wears my boots and uses my name/I can’t seem to throw him out“). It’s quietly devastating.
The slowly strummed waltzing Colour TV is another account of a relationship sundered (“I’m sorry my love for the hell that I bring/For the holes in the roof and the songs that I sing/For the nights that I missed and the silence I speak/For the dust in the kitchen and the distance I keep”) that strikes a haunting image in the line “I’ve been building a shelter since the devil went free/Out of empty bottles and colour TV”.
The first of two numbers pushing past the fine-minute mark, the strummed Dreamland takes the tempo up somewhat for a dust-coated, rasp-vocal apocalyptic vision of chaos and disorder (“From the endlessness a familiar voice speaks out a message/While flashing lights and tailbacks stretch out far behind the wreckage/And those shadows cast a sunset that could bring tears to the masses/But it is just the view when the sun goes down in dreamland”) that has echoes of Dylan but also Eric Anderson as he paints a stark environmental warning (“soon the air they breathe will be more precious than the diamonds they are saving”) as “…a thousand forest fires/Will burn until the walls come down in dreamland”, and that we are all responsible (“Everyone you’ve ever met was you in different clothing”).
After a dark vision of the old world passing, he follows it with the light of echoing vocals of Love In The New World (“Watch the sunshine landing on our broken skin/It has travelled through the void and turned red and golden/Let it take away the fear and original sin”), one of the few tracks to feature a percussive backing. It’s followed by the sparse title track, an undercurrent of paranoia (“There’s something wrong with the boiler/Makes a noise when I sleep/I’m beginning to wonder/If it’s trying to say something to me”) that, along with the line “I’ve been struggling with the loneliness” gives it a pandemic resonance, but also thoughts of mortality (“Daddy’s gonna die some day”) and mental infirmity (“I don’t know if you’ve noticed/I’ve been losing my mind”).
Striking a particular Dylan-like note, using the imagery of moving home, Must Be Time For Moving On again speaks of loss and impermanence (“There was laughter in this house/I don’t know if I’m finally slipping away/Or if I’m slowly waking up”), of when it is “All said, all done“. It seems apposite then to follow it with Candles For The Dead, unquestionably one of the best things he’s ever written, which, putting me in mind of Tim Buckley, plays like a requiem for the human race (“The universe won’t rest until/We are salt and rust”) but also of raging against the dying of the light (“She’ll hold me in her drunken arms/And then we’ll rot away/This will be our victory chant/And our last parade”) and, once more, an image of rebirth (“There’s new growth in the garden now/Shrubs have no time for fear/Just a little sun and rain…”).
Channelling Dylan at his most poetic, metaphoric and meditative, electronics swirling subtly around the guitar notes, the second-longest track is another masterpiece, Her Own Private Universe, a metaphysical-infused narrative about a relationship within which the lovers were the only planets and the final inspired lines “Half a pack of playing cards and a photograph of her/And on the back beneath her name, just these words: Between the chaos and the void, the miracle is us“.
Riding a circular fingerpicked melody and bluesy feel, Live Again is a call for release and rebirth after enforced isolation (“Running from the darkness, putting down roots/Staring at the window, crowds of people”), that defiance also fuelling the anthemic singalong Pushing Against Us (I was reminded of Mike Peters) with its refusal to be beaten down, whether by a pandemic or a tyranny (“It’s pushing against us…We’re still here”) and how “All the walls will turn to rubble in the end“. It’s probably also the first and only song to mention Kepler 22b, the first planet discovered in the universe’s habitable zone.
And, continuing that thread of thought, it ends with the cosmic atmospherics of the shimmering, fluttering The Lonely & The Brave with its brief but radiantly positive lyric: “This is not the end/We can still be saved by the lonely and the brave”. A magnificent album that mines diamonds of hope from the rock of despair; that’s not a hole around his head, it’s a halo of light.
Pre-Order The Hole Around My Head (22 October) – https://www.willvarley.com/