Weekend Intermission is our regular feature where we look at an artist or band not from the Nordic countries, just to mix things up a bit.
To say that Kristin McClement’s second long-player, ‘Chalk from the Downs, Iron from my Blood’, is welcome is an understatement. Over a decade on from her beautiful debut, ‘The Wild Grips’, McClement sounds more mature and elegant, wiser, and more essential than ever before, songs like dark, twinkling stars embedding themselves inside her listeners for good.
Arriving more like literature in song, the sonically exquisite, the sound of the earth and its vulnerability, humanity and its penchant for self-destruction, McClement knows things here, a virtuoso conducting nature from a mountaintop. She captures feelings, places, the unknown. She catapults us toward the truth, though its telling isn’t easy to speak or to hear.
The novella-like ‘The Ever Present Philosopher’ breaks and mends the heart before it proceeds to break it again. Where the opener sees her voice in the background, almost as though coming from a distant dream, ‘Is This Graceland?’ brings McClement’s voice to the foreground, sits her beside us to relate a musical tale of gently sweeping grace.
While ‘Heroine’ might seem an unlikely single to precede a record, it is clinical in capturing the ghostly drifting magic of McClement, her voice, her sense of nature inside the music, spilling into the album title and beyond. While ‘Shapeshifting’ echoes its predecessors’ sensations of teetering on the brink, it’s devastating to consider there is nowhere else, and with nobody other than the singer, you would rather be.
‘The Fisherman’ – another single before the album’s release – is elegant, uplifting, and utterly heart-breaking. ‘Love Doesn’t Have to Come at Such a Price’ brings Side A to a close with its plaintive piano and message of hope and how it opens us up with its emotional scalpel simply leaves the listener itching to hear Side B.
With the first half near immaculate, it is extraordinary to think this final track is a peak of that half. By now, it is clear we are dealing with a dark, delicious, and deadly gem of a record.
Which indeed, we are. Side B opener ‘The Eventual’ is fleeting, leaving you gasping for more, and as the album progresses the cover art seems to pull you into its apparent water, splashing, swimming, drowning, further sublime cinematic folk drama surrounding us.
The almost gothic seven-minute epic ‘Didn’t We Come Close’ brings down the curtain with mesmerising deftness – of touch, of feel, of spirit. As the song shifts halfway through and a gently plucked classical guitar takes over before McClement’s voice enters again and commands the stage one final time, it’s a marvel to know we are in the presence of a fairytale enchantment.
A highlight of the year? No doubt whatsoever. ‘Chalk from the Downs, Iron from My Blood’ somehow addresses the gap of over a decade since the record’s predecessor by filling the entire wait and beyond with extraordinary magic, playing to nobody’s beat but the creator’s own. And let’s face it, that is when the greatest music of all is made. A vital record to live with until one’s dying day.
This record will have you falling in love with McClement and her music all over again. It seems impossible to consider it not having that effect on everybody who finds it.
Music not just to listen to, but to give your soul to. Her second long player is certainly one of the year’s best albums.
NMC rating: 10/10
Find her on:
Website: https://www.kristinmcclement.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kristinmcclementmusic
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/k_mcclement/
Bandcamp: https://kristinmcclement.bandcamp.com/
