ALBUM REVIEW: Solstice – A.A. Williams
With Solstice, London-based A.A. WILLIAMS picks up the beautifully melancholic baton dropped by ANATHEMA at their dissolution. She becomes poet laureate of tender and deeply felt songs about the thorns of love. On a record in which she sounds lost at sea and terribly alone, her music is an outstretched hand inviting you to sit with her in the dark.
It’s a wonder to create an album so full of loneliness but make the listener feel the artist as a companion. Maybe it comes from the confessional and raw nature of WILLIAMS’ pen. When on Little By Little she admits “I’ve always known that I’d lose myself with you” – which could be read as a romantic notion, on the page she acknowledges having foresight of herself being chipped away. The song title, a recurring lyrical motif, is the sound of this emotional attrition. With her voice front and centre in the mix, she amplifies her inner turmoil, as if keeping eye contact with the listener, sharing her burden, owning it.
And letting it go, too. There’s a familiar structure to many of Solstice’s songs, but there’s no point in fixing what’s not broken. Their final movement is often an explosion of power, a stomp on a guitar pedal, exorcising what’s within. Having opened for the likes of CULT OF LUNA and SLEEP TOKEN, she shares those artists’ sense of musical drama. By starting with a whisper, the roar is all the more deafening. But by showing structural restraint, there are no 15-minute epics here, she lands on a kind of pop post-metal. Each track is an accessible version of a genre known for taking its time, ideal if you want cathartic crescendos without having to clear your schedule.
On her quieter moments, WILLIAMS’ music recalls PORTISHEAD’s soulful longing, tinging it with even rainier clouds. Wolves begins downcast and gentle, WILLIAMS’ voice mournful. It could be taking place in a lonely bedroom or a smoky bar. Then comes the lashing of the chorus, all wall-of-noise, accompanying her cries of fragility; “I am just not strong enough”. She gets to the heart of Solstice on Hold It Together when she sings “Don’t you know this isn’t easy feeling everything so deeply?’” The rest of the record is testament to that, an artist laying bare her fragility and her devotion and how she’s been feeling lately. It doesn’t sound easy.
The days get brighter following the winter solstice. Closer The Gentle Harm invokes imagery of new beginnings, breaking free from prisons, turning towards the light. If the only way out is through, Solstice is through. A.A. WILLIAMS has refined her formula here, on album number three, and delivered a body of work that rewards those who treat it as a whole. The recurrence of poison across the record evokes a slow corruption of something once special, and repeatedly WILLIAMS tells the subject of her songs the likes of “I will” on Hold It Together and “I am willing” on It Won’t Rain Forever. She makes hopeless little promises and commitments to a wilting love. Haven’t we all?
Rating: 8/10
Solstice is out now via RPM.
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