Angie McMahon: Light Sides
Out now
DL
The new EP from Angie McMahon provides a perfect accompaniment to 2023’s meditative Light, Dark, Light Again album.
There are many ways you can seek to feel better in life. You can pay a heavy price, finding yourself, for a week at a healing retreat or for a remote, off-grid cabin in the woods. You can spend days reading self-help manuals or months in therapy. Three litres of strong cider is a less economically-punishing alternative, but you’ll pay a heavy price for that in many different ways. Angie McMahon’s Light Sides EP comes out on September 13th and gives you a cost-effective, nineteen-minutes-long, long-lasting option for lightening your mood and your existential load.
The tracks were recorded around the same as her deeply emotive Light, Dark, Light Again album that was released in October 2023, as well as during stop-offs whilst on tour thereafter. Tracks were put to tape at studios in North America and on Wurundjeri and Dja Dja Wurrung Country, lands stolen from the First Nations people of Australia many years ago. You can feel all the elements of when and how the songs were inspired and recorded on Light Sides. The tracks contain a real sense of reclaiming and repossessing what’s rightfully yours in life.
The feeling of being on tour comes through in the way that each trtack makes you feel like you’re progressing – really getting somewhere positive by the end, no matter how daunting or arduous the journey may have seemed to begin. However the songs begin on the EP, they always manoeuvre you towards a glimpse of new light or more triumphantly lead you out of the shadow of the valley and into sunlit open plains. There’s also a convincing sense in all of the songs that adversity, particularly the lowest ebb, the darkest points of your own existence, can bring you to a genuine portal for enlightenment and change.
Beginner, the EP’s opener, begins as a slow, sombre waltz. You have McMahon’s voice, a simple guitar line and the frisson of occasional drum rills that feel like the shiver of uncertainty that the lyrics convey (“I had to reach the bottom,/ Begging at the door,/ Praying it would open to who I was before” and “I reached the peak of the mountain while I was crying on the floor.”)
The near-whispered vocal at the start builds, gaining textured layers and reverb, into the storm of the chorus that clears the air and makes you feel like you can breathe freely. The initially brisk, edgy drum rill morphs into a what sounds like a powerful kettle drum roll towards the end. McMahon’s lyric, “I felt like I was dying, but I was just being born,” sums up the way the song changes from beginning to end perfectly.
Just Like North speaks of going back to the sea for a “powerful washing away” to “rinse off old parts of me.” It’s about seeking ‘outlines’ and ‘road signs’, reorienting yourself by finding lost bearings – working out who you are as well as where you are. Anyone who’s screamed “It’s OK. It’s OK. Make mistakes. Make mistakes,” while listening to Letting Go from the album of 2023 will find calmer but equally reassuring similarity in repeating the simple wisdom of “If you get everything right, then there’s nothing else left.”
The moment this message kicks in, the song gets its surge of reassuring volume and energy. “Pain is on every map, just like North is,” we are told, whilst the song reminds us that there will be people there for us when we’re Northbound, as well as containing the obvious sense that there are three other points to life’s compass.
Untangling is the EP’s middle point and probably its highest peak. There aren’t strictly and stand-out songs on Light Sides, but that’s only because they all stand with equal grace, pride and dignity. If Adam Granduciel hasn’t already been tempted to do a War On Drugs cover of this since its single release, then it’s surely only a matter of time. Roaming the musical topography of a suite of Angie McMahon songs is a rich and rewarding exploration.
Everything about Untangling feels propulsive and progressive. The synth bed at the start, along with the rhythm section of drums and bass, create a forward momentum that aligns with the idea of taking a fresh path in life. It feels linear, purposeful and genuinely unobstructed, untangled. As in Just Like North, we’re in affirmation and then mantra territory with “It was a joint misadventure and I am untangling you from my centre,” followed swiftly by “Go, Angel. It’s OK. Sometimes things are gonna feel this way.” Letting go of whatever is knotty in life becomes a declaration of intent – something to pick up and run with.
“Human highways” are explored in Interstate. It begins, like Beginner, in quiet vulnerability. There’s a sense of letting go here too, but it’s more about relinquishing the fear to love. This begins as a sense of loss and becoming untethered: “I lose my gravity. All of that work out of my hands. Losing my grip like a kid letting go of a kite.” Powerful stabs of guitar sound like emotional jabs of apprehension. But the track lightens and brightens and the guitars change, feeling as powerful, but more uplifting, when McMahon decides that it’s the ‘here and now’ of travelling that needs to be embraced, not where it might end up: “Man, I love to feel this way, floating on the interstate. Cruising off to hide away, but light enough to smile.”
Light Sides concludes with Take Up Space. A simple piano ballad to start, the track balances the soul-searching introspection that McMahon mines to such devastatingly beautiful effect and direct address towards an unspecific, universal ‘you’ figure whom we’ve probably all met and carried on our backs during our numerous trips around the sun. This ‘you’ figure could as easily represent the narrator giving herself a good talking to as her own source of previous feelings of smallness: “I’ve worn out my shoes trying to keep up with the walk that I walk with you.”
There’s yet more recognisable everyday truth in the notion of learning to keep quiet when your body speaks, as well as hurting, but hiding it “in a not-so-invisible place.” After 75 seconds of the vocals evoking the feeling of being minimised and worn down, the titular phrase surfaces, in “I wanna take up space,” accompanied by a burst of sound that’s like resurfacing from under water or being transported through a portal into more pleasant dimension. It’s chaotic, yet cathartic. Diminuendo piano chords take us to the end. “You” is repeated as the track closes – a sweet exorcism of the “you” that once haunted.
Angie McMahon’s music resounds with the darkest dusks and brightest dawns of being alive. You’re constantly revisiting the emotional places you’ve been, both beautiful and barren. If yoga, meditation, cold-water swimming, forest-bathing, therapy or cider are what you feel you need to seek the lighter sides – you do you. Maybe just give Angie’s new EP a try first…
Find Angie McMahon online here, as well as on Facebook and Instagram.
All words by Jon Kean. More writing by Jon on Louder Than War can be found at his author’s archive. He tweets as @keanotherapy.
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