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Parenthesis, I, Josienne Clarke’s latest album, follows on from last year’s Onliness, with the musicians involved in that release lending their support once again on this collection of new material: Alec Bowman-Clarke on bass, Dave Hamblett on drums, and Matt Robinson on keyboards. Josienne plays guitar, clarinet, recorder, and saxophone.
The songs are often deeply confessional, albeit couched in oblique and metaphorical imagery, a case in point being the airy, shuffling opener Friendly Teeth, a song about needing people to be honest with her (“there’s nothing more ugly than lies upon lies upon lies… I’ve been everyone’s fool/And lies are the harshest cruelty”), about making her own decisions (“An ounce of trepidation in my step/With a slight discomfort in my zone/To leap, carefully, into the unknown”) and calling for a “truth so strong/That it comes right up and bites you on the shoulder with its friendly teeth”.
Geometry has its place in her store of images, the carousel rhythm of Spherical exploring getting back to herself (“I’ve been drawing a circle/Back to myself/So slowly it looked like a line/That I went way off/Faraway from the place/That I started”), picking up the notion that in my end is my beginning, but also drawing on magical ideas of protection (“I’ve been drawing a circle/Around myself/To keep from the dangerous/Dark eclipsing/Circling round the doubt/A ring/To never let in or give out”, capturing the sense of both being safe but also trapped within such defences.
Just voice and watery fingerpicked guitar, while influences such as Nick Drake, Sandy Denny and Anaïs Mitchell are often cited, Fear Of Falling also casts her as a pastoral folk prototype for newcomers such as Katherine Priddy and Flo Perlin, though it also filters the Americana colours of Courtney Marie Andrews in a song about leaving the past behind and embracing the future (not flying for fear of falling), the lyrics peppered with imagery drawn from her new home on the Isle of Bute (“The birds are singing brightly in the tall trees of Skeoch wood/And scarcely I believed that peace of mind in life could be as good”).
Of a jazzier persuasion, Do You Know Now?, with its nervy, neurotic keyboard pulse, is an exorcism of sorts as she sings, “There’s no blood and no bone/To connect me to you/No familiar, no friend/Every contact cut or ended… do you know now/That no part of me/Is a part of you”, whether that’s disconnecting from a person or a mental state. Coloured with sax, Looking Glass sustains that cool, jazzy vibe to a song that conjures a composed detachment (“Poised and precise/Glass and ice/Always be nice/Just a slice, a sliver/Fine on the eye/I can reliably refine/What you like”) while the plucked electric guitar figure and glacial Forbearing wrings the heart with lyrics that touch on the despair of her miscarriages (“It broke my heart/‘Til I, willing to die/Could see no light/In my fruitless life”) and the way it made her feel about herself (“If damaged fruit/Is all I can give to you/That‘ll have to do… I can’t bear/Bring myself to blame myself again/It isn’t fair/We’re all taught to tear ourselves apart”).
There’s more soul-baring on the compact, stripped-back lo-fi autobiographical Most of All, a number, the original haunted demo she describes as “a licking of wounds and counting of blessings, taking stock and setting straight in my head”, with lines like “There’s a room where everyone hangs on my every word/But in our haunted house my daddy rarely heard a word I said …My mother praised me for being truthful all my days/But I needed things that I did not say/I did not ask, did not complain/I let my wants wash away… I let the heartless make a host of me/And they plundered me for melody/Left me not a note to sing”, again exposing the raw nerve of her miscarriages (“Maybe I won’t be no one’s mother in the end/I took the pills, the potions and the vitamins/But I could not keep my darlings in”), though for all that, it’s ultimately a song of defiance (“I will not live my life in pain/If I can’t see the way on any given day/I’ll take a breath and look again”) and finding peace (“My lover loves me most of all/He can write a beautiful love song but he can barely sing at all”).
Though just under two minutes, Double-Edged Sword, with its repeated rippling guitar pattern, is one of the album’s most complex tracks with its double-tracked vocals, keyboard drone and full band on another defiant note and refusal to surrender (“Bring me a double edged sword, and I’ll show you an iron will …My ability to stay alive’s my only power”). Featuring jazzy piano, things turn to a soulful folk persuasion on the upfront love song that is Firecracker (“You’re a loose cannon baby and I’m a firecracker/What a beautiful mess we make/Leaving dust in our wake/Laying waste to it all”) that echoes Neil Young’s better to burn out than fade away credo (“Like moths to a flame/Drowning in shame/We’re losing every game/Cos we’d rather find out/Excluding all doubt/And go brightly burning out …As we spoil for a fight/And triumph overall”).
The longest track, opening with simple distant piano notes and scuffed drums before the repeated sparse guitar motif, A Dead Woman’s Bones is also the closest she lyrically gets to a traditional folk number (“He plays a song/On a lute he made/Its pure tone/Made of dead woman’s bones/The tune he plays/Are the notes he stole/And those words/Such lovely words/Such poetry/A dead woman’s poems”) though you’re unlikely to find anything like “His literal hand on her metaphorical throat” in the Cecil Sharp library.
It hits the last lap with piano and fingerpicked The Calm with its whisperingly sung sense of having survived the vicissitudes (“When all’s said and done/Under the sun/You can’t kill me/I won/So getting stronger/Has begun… Growing the sweetest of roses from the thorns/Going the closest to breaking, being reborn”) as it quietly builds and soars before ebbing away.
Accompanied by keyboard drone, the slow walking rhythm title track provides the penultimate number with its theme of recovery, living life outside the imprisoning brackets (“Parenthesis, I (think I) am done with you…put cessation in its place and face down the demon/Now darkness is only an absence of light in its space/To keep staring into the void/Re-wounding indefinitely is a choice/I choose not to make/A path it didn’t take/Undestroyed”), where “There are windows to open/A curtain to draw/To let hope out the building/Let the winds roar through the halls”.
It ends, then, with the brushed drums, piano, circling guitar and soaring background choral vocals of Magic, Somehow, a reaffirmation of what the power of a song can do for those who hear it (“Sing us one of your sad songs/The one about love/Make it make us give in and never give up… Sing us one of your sad songs/The one about time/Make us die on the inside/And feel so alive/Tell us the world is illusion/But you know the truth/Say it’s beautiful, show us proof”). The album an affirmation that out of the deepest darkness sometimes comes the brightest light, to paraphrase her lyric, Clarke spins her alchemy, she gives us hope.
Parenthesis, I is released on 9th May 2024 on Corduroy Punk.
https://josienneclarke.bandcamp.com/album/parenthesis-i
