I'm Not Sure At All
Album review
I’m Not Sure At All is as exquisite as debut albums get. A wandering storybook of impossibly beautiful harmonies, rolling keyboards and a beautifully intimate vocal that is as vulnerable as it is fearless.
Marlody’s high achieving classical pianist background is evident throughout. The musicianship is sublime, seamlessly shapeshifting from minor to major to construct gift after gift of dark beauty, pain, survival and solidarity.
When she was a girl, Marlody was one of the higher-achieving classical pianists of her generation, winning competitions and destined for greatness. She hated it and drew a line under that part of her life. In the intervening years, putting more and more distance between herself and her classical origins, she listened to Yo La Tengo and Shellac and a hundred other things that took music to new, untutored extremes. I’m Not Sure At All is the outcome.
The album opener, Summer, captures the emotions of losing a parent – thoughts that remain unresolved, the forlorn grief of new beginnings metamorphosising into fragile hope. It’s delicately meditative and cathartic.
The subjects that Marlody presents often deal with an aftermath of some sorts – the debilitating effect of psychiatric medication on Words, the self explanatory Runaway, solidarity with all those people who’ve contemplated taking their own lives on Friends In Low Places, the history of an adulterous affair, with a piercing sympathy for the emotional state of the adulterer on Wrong. The subjects are delivered with calm and fragile beauty. Their truths become powerful and hopeful. Is there a right or wrong answer to those truths? Or is our instinctive response what matters? It’s ok to be not sure at all.
I’m Not Sure At All is released on 13th January 2022 on Skep Wax Records
https://www.instagram.com/_marlody_/
To celebrate the launch Marlody will be performing two concerts
14th January, 7pm: Unitarian Meeting House, Tenterden, Kent – tickets from here
15th January, 4pm: Betsey Trotwood, London – tickets from here
