SHANNON WRIGHT - Division

If there's one contemporary musician who has made visceral intensity her guiding light in the dark, who has poured herself unfiltered into her substantial body of recorded work, it is undoubtedly Shannon Wright. Between abrasive guitars, straight out of the best hardcore tradition, and nimble piano compositions, the now two-decade-long artistic path of the Jacksonville artist has seen her bear witness, with mixed fortunes but a never-compromising attitude, to one of the most impassioned and vital approaches in rock songwriting worldwide, reaching excellent expressive peaks with the pairing of "Let In The Light" and "Honeybee Girls". And yet, it seemed that this extraordinary creative drive had reached its end: motherhood certainly slowed down the process and the inspiration, but the path that led to the conception of "Division" was also marked by far less happy events and situations, including second thoughts about continuing her career and a general sense of insecurity toward the world. It took the involvement of friends and collaborators to bring this unusually long hiatus to an end, allowing Wright's ninth solo album (written between Rome and Paris) to finally see the light of day — one of the most distinctive and multifaceted records in her rich songbook, as well as yet another turning point in a stylistic body of work in constant evolution, a clear expression of the restlessness and passion that never cease to inform the author's powerful inventiveness. Of all the possible turns she could have taken, this is certainly one of the most surprising.

Not that Shannon Wright has ever been incapable of preserving the aching, angry fabric of her art even while giving up overt electric discharges and noise-rock inflections, yet never as much as on "Division" (a title that says it all) can one appreciate such an all-consuming pain, a distress born of a vulnerability that leaves no escape, indeed turning into an unsuppressible anguish, a suffering that best encapsulates the inner conflicts the musician has lived through firsthand. Precisely because of this aura of fragility that constantly permeates the whole record (and which is brilliantly reflected in the singer's fractured delivery), the decision to almost entirely suppress the guitars in favor of piano, organ, keyboards and viola da gamba further sharpens the pronounced emotional qualities of this new batch of compositions, in which the freedom to experiment is higher than ever.

Where the six strings continue to add their embellishment, the result is nonetheless anything but predictable: in the title track, strategically placed as the opener, the droning electric guitar commentary, for instance, hugely intensifies the industrial feel of the arrangement, as well as the author's aching delivery, almost a vocal extension of the oppressive hammering that accompanies the song. The chamber-like touch of the Wurlitzer on "Wayward", meanwhile, introduces a slowly unfolding composition, in which the notes follow one another in an increasingly possessed crescendo, around which scattered looped electronic echoes are grafted, along with a superb doom-leaning finale that underscores the inconstancy evoked by the song's title.

Not that the tone is any brighter or more relaxed elsewhere: at best the mood thins out into an afflicted melancholy, a pain kept quiet but always present, from which there is essentially no point in fleeing. In "Seemingly" a distorted piano simulating the crystal music boxes of Colleen is used as the almost exclusive support for Wright's unusually candid voice, "dirtied" just slightly by a rough backdrop; in "Iodine", instead, the path takes a lucifer-ish blues route with faint psychedelic ripples, relying on a melodic ostinato that heightens the song's sinister charge. And when the journey crosses into more overtly dark territory, the conviction with which the musician delves into the tunnels of contemporary goth has few equals.

"The Thirst" filters and smooths out the rough edges of the vocal line, letting the sonic backdrop paint threatening brushstrokes, between even more massive doom-like slowdowns, impetuous drumming and hallucinated keyboards, working both in contrast to and in synthesis with the nostalgic chamber-music piano line. The closing "Lighthouse (Drag Us In)" then pushes the neoclassical discourse to its extreme consequences, with David Chalmin's viola da gamba delivering the final blow by grafting a vigorous waltz onto a core skeleton that recalls the timeless allure of Chopin's nocturnes, rendered even more vivid by a diaphanous, ghostly delivery unlike anything she's done before, the kind that so many goth heroines have still failed to master.

If it's true that the black rain has continued, despite all prayers, to beat down on Shannon Wright's path, her art has nonetheless been unaffected by it — indeed, it has drawn deep inspiration from it, resulting in a searing record that takes no prisoners, yet still aims for maximum emotional and sonic economy, with no redundancies to weaken its expressive power. While the author does seem to have moved past the problems that had slowed her creative output, "Division" nonetheless remains the clearest and most urgent testimony of a creative impasse overcome by claiming it musically, yielding one of the most important moments of her long career. Whether this will be the springboard for an even more committed exploration of her darker traits is for the future to decide, but this does not change the fact that the musician's new aesthetic profile describes, with renewed momentum, those traits that have always formed the backbone of her art. That is a fact that should by no means be underestimated.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

09/09/2017