Apartments

"My feelings? About ten years ago, I hid them somewhere and haven't been able to find them", says Robert Mitchum in Jacques Tourneur's noir masterpiece "Out Of The Past", a film that Peter Milton-Walsh, a devoted cinephile, recently named in an interview as one of the essential touchstones of his imagination. As glacial as it is illusory, Mitchum's line was merely a device to expose the impossibility of leaving one's inner turmoil buried in the most remote corners of the past, since a person's demons can't be tamed by the passing of time, and it takes very little to draw them back out from the depths of the soul.

That conflict between apparent detachment and the heart's inescapable fragility is precisely the focal point of Walsh's outlook, which in 1995 becomes the driving force behind a tormented collection of memories bearing the programmatic title "A Life Full Of Farewells". A shadowy yet well-known figure on the late-70s Australian scene - enough to briefly become a member of the Go-Betweens - Walsh reaches the peak of his discography just as the window of opportunity for making a living out of music has already closed. His debut, back in 1985, sparks a small cult following within the indie community with its elegant, crepuscular jangle, but fails to break through anywhere except France, where he still enjoys solid popularity today. The Australian takes another eight years to release its follow-up, "Drift", before entering a three-year stretch (1995-1997) of unexpected inspiration, during which he'll give the Apartments' sound an even more defined identity. A genuine artistic lesson whose fruits wouldn't be long in coming.

With the band now officially settled as a trio (alongside Walsh, Eliot Fish of Big Heavy Stuff on bass and Mark Dawson on drums) and rounded out by a string and horn section, the Australian songwriter chooses here to give voice to the bitter contemplation that (perhaps) precedes a crucial turning point, dressing his confessions in a chamber pop steeped in melancholy, yet never smothered by anguish.

Opening the ball are the trumpet melodies of “Things You’ll Keep”, which, in homage to Burt Bacharach, sketch a light, catchy pattern, faintly perfumed with jazz, lending a veneer of serenity that's soon dissolved by a stream of memories as murky as a winter sky. Walsh surveys, with unsettling composure, poignant snapshots of ruin, like “The Failure Of Love Is A Brick Wall”, whose acoustic arpeggios seem to sharpen like knives against caustic lines (“Failure came and took your hand, you always meant to miss it”), or “You Became My Big Excuse”, a pedal-steel ballad for open spaces watched through a window, which gracefully unfolds the horror-tinged side of intimacy (“The poison that I drink when I sink my teeth in you”).

With its emotional tension held in check, yet always palpable, the album marks its shifts in pace through the counterpoint of a violin here, a cello there, or a muted trumpet, so that every element takes on a precise aesthetic purpose, whether it's the depiction of distant yet inescapable memories (the horns of “Not Every Clown Can Be In The Circus”), or the allusion to escape routes of uncertain real-world feasibility (the measured layering of “End Of Some Fear” and the irrepressible “All The Time In The World”).

Every moment of “A Life Full Of Farewells” is, in its own way, memorable, thanks to the crystalline purity of its melodies and the sensitivity of the dialogue between lyrics and arrangements; though, if we're being honest, it's hard not to reserve a special place in the heart for two deeply moving reflections such as “Thank You For Making Me Beg” and, above all, the indescribable voice-and-piano elegy “She Sings To Forget You”. This is perhaps the fullest expression of a confessional tone that constantly pulses beneath the cultured, detached veneer of Walsh's art; an art whose peak is represented by this miniature Blood On The Tracks, a cult work to be jealously guarded and potentially destined to become a hidden milestone of the chamber-pop that contemporary indie has brought back into the spotlight.

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06/12/2015