Holly Throsby – A Loud Call (2008)
Sometimes I forget how to sleep.
It happened a few weeks ago for no good reason. Me and my jammies were freshly laundered, my sheets folded back just so, my phone alarm already set for the next morning (‘Your alarm will go off in 13 hours and 43 minutes’). Like a literature-eating bedsnake, I’d slithered between the sheets and burrowed into a good book. My first mistake was that it was too good a book: 900-page The Passage by Justin Cronin, which I read in about four days. My second mistake was that ‘literature-eating bedsnake’ simile I dropped just now. I’m so sorry.
The goodness of this novel was such that I unwisely pushed past the sleep barrier until I gained my second wind. Unfortunately the second wind was nothing like the sweet, lazy first wind that carries me through most days: this one was sour and bitter and a bit soupy, like a lonely old man farting on a hot train. As soon as that turgid, gelatinous tide of wakefulness washed over me I knew I’d made a horrible mistake. Why was I such a stupid reading nerd? Why hadn’t I given into the gentle tug of sleep? Note that I am fully aware of the things I could do with ‘turgid’[*] and ‘gentle tug’ – fully aware – but I’m choosing graciously to move on.
I don’t find it easy to get to sleep at the best of times…actually, that’s a lie. The ‘best of times’ tend to happen after a few drinks, which is, coincidentally, when I’m most likely be near, in, or beaten into unconsciousness. But most of the time, falling asleep is a bit of a chore. When I’m asleep, it’s the opposite: it takes many hours, decibels and brave men to drag me out of a good snooze. Mornings confuse and irritate me, as do the people who cheerfully inhabit them.
I have reason to believe that morning people are insane. This is based on personal experience: I know all too well the terror of living through an entire morning. And I mean an entire morning – from those preternaturally still pre-dawn hours to that final gratifying slide into midday, when ice cream and alcohol become socially acceptable once again. It happened to me that night, when, like a gypsy groom to his bride on their wedding night (I have no evidence to back this allegation, not even hearsay), sleep briefly teabagged me and then fled into the night. At the risk of revealing how sheltered my life has been, it may have been the worst experience I have ever had. There is something, though, nauseatingly frightening about lying in the dark, feeling the pillow grow hot beneath your head, folding and twisting sheets in different combinations, willing the glowing red numbers on your clock to slide backwards, watching the darkness slowly abate and realising, finally, that sleep will never come, that you’ve just spent eight hours lying awake doing nothing but wishing for oblivion, that the day is here and there’s work and things to do and people to be civil to and it’s unreasonably bright for so early and goddammit the birds are loud and how the fuck can anyone say they like this time of day?
There is one thing that can make a night of insomnia almost bearable. It’s not sleep (well, actually, it should be sleep, but I didn’t think of that when I wrote the preceding sentence, and I’m not changing it, so just go with me). Nor is it Jedi kittens. It’s A Loud Call, the trophomore album of underrated Sydney songstress Holly Throsby. Forget Enya (if you hadn’t already) – this is the ideal sleepytime soundtrack, guaranteed to blunt your bitterness when sleep is elusive.
It’s hard to describe what makes Call such a good adult lullaby album without sounding dismissive. For starters, ‘lullaby’ is probably the wrong term. It doesn’t usher you into sleep so much as drown you in comforting restfulness. At the first soft swarming of strings at the start of Warm Jets I can feel tension seeping from me, like interstitial fluid gently flowing from a lymph node into the left or right subclavian vein (sorry, I’ve just been wikiing…) Throsby’s voice is soft, almost conversational and technically unremarkable, but it resonates with something that strikes me as primitive, or at least very old: a deep and weary wisdom wrapped in the tremulous fragility of her words.
It seems to me that in folk music, or one of the many folk hybrid genres (filk music, anyone?), there’s a lot more room for character in vocals. Singers like Joni Mitchell, Regina Spektor, Devendra Banhart or Colin Meloy of The Decemberists (the first four that came to mind) can definitely hold a tune, but more importantly their voices are distinctive and flexible enough to convey a range of personalities and emotions. Technical perfection can be impressive, but more often that not it’s just boring. That’s probably why I don’t give a crap about opera.
Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that if Holly Throsby’s voice was ‘better’, her songs would be worse. Her lyrics are profound largely for their ordinariness and simplicity. There’s a haunting, familiar quality to her words and a melancholy eloquence in the things she chooses to leave unsaid.
The time it takes to make hearts break
Is the same as for a girl to skip a stone.
And any chore, or a shirt on the floor
Is enough to make a person feel alone.
Enough to make a person feel alone.
I don’t have a favourite song from this album. To be honest, if you mentioned the names of the songs to me, I probably wouldn’t know what you were talking about. Everything about Call – music, lyrics, production – is spare, simple and unprepossessing. One thing just flows into another. This isn’t an album to pick and choose from; it needs to be listened to in its entirety. This is an album to gently inhabit, for a day or an hour or a sleepless night; a small, neat, soft-lit cottage of an album.
After saying all that it seems wrong to leave you with any particular song from Call, so here’s one of her best from her first album On Night.
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[*]I also just learned that turgid can mean “tediously pompous or bombastic” when applied to writing. Shut up.
nightcheese 