Can one naturally live through a major phase of their life and not realize it’s done? Perhaps not even have any memory of it? For the bulk of her early adulthood, Amy Millan has spent her time working with Kevin Drew, Brendan Canning, and the rest of Broken Social Scene; and when she hasn’t been engaged by that massive merry-go-round of music, she’s been working with Torquil Campbell and the rest of her bandmates in Stars. One has to imagine how a great deal of life experience would have to stem from this. As one who’s just about lived through their 20s will tell you, this transition from youth to full-on adulthood can go by in a flash, what with the flourishing activity of new experiences it’s likely to encompass. So when one is at the far end of it, it wouldn’t be to unnatural a thing for one to notice that they’re present at the end of something, and that they remember it’s beginning, but what’s happened in between seems to carry a muted quality to it, only to be remembered when it’s polite ghosts arrive in your present life as some form of cognitive specter. This brings one back to the introductory question of this article. The memories of course are still there, but the tragedy is that they will never be remembered, accessed in the same way that they were in their immediate wake. Perhaps that’s where the sense of quaint sadness evoked by Millan’s second solo effort Masters of the Burial stems from.
Now, while this is a study of a single album, it is perhaps best to contextualize it against the characteristics of it’s predecessor Honey from the Tombs. For if there is one glaringly obvious truth to this album that stands out after a full listen, it’s that in terms of general sound and lyrical message, it’s much more consistent, and especially more cohesive. Millan’s first foray into a solo project was a grouping of songs put into a collection that didn’t know what it wanted to be. Not that they were necessarily bad in any way, or that the album was not entertaining, it’s just an entity different in art form from what exists here with Masters of the Burial. In fact, what we have here is a slow and sweet country album mired in reflection of a “past life” so-to-speak.
Millan proves herself immensely adept at songwriting yet again with this album, offering up a collection of eleven tracks that are remarkably forthcoming, and in fact do so right from the get-go with it’s initial/title-track. From the very onset of “Bruised Ghosts”, the listener is treated to an eerie preview of what the album as a whole conveys in spirit. There’s much less confusion this time around with this Stars star’s second solo work, which offers songs that are more clear and forthcoming with emotions. The title track goes on to exemplify this:
Hold it up
you’ve lost enough
you’ve still got your luck
you’re miles away
from the love you’ve made
heaven gets rough
Later, Millan goes on to sing, “Ghosts weren’t meant for bleed”, before exclaiming how one has to go “follow through” in life with their “bruises”. The point of these being perhaps to immediately establish how this album seems to sing of experiences that are long past, as if Millan is at the end of a great period in her life, before setting off to the next. Perhaps she exists in that morsel of time between one album tour, and the next, that time spent at home, what does one do with themselves? Who knows.
There’s plenty of other things to take notice of on this record as well. “Run for Me” has that resonating far-away guitar accompaniment that is reminiscent of a lot of Chan Marshall’s work with Cat Power. It’s a spooky song that seems to drip a bit with sad desperation, singing “I’ve got nothing to live up to, and I’ve nothing to reveal. Go on, run for me…’cause I can’t take it back…now it’s gone”. “Lost Compass” is another tune of curious quality, standing out due to the fact that it sounds as if it were recorded in Millan’s living room, therefore evoking a certain stripped down intimacy to it. She lays herself nakedly in this one, singing “the faces I never thought I’d be, the places I’d never thought I’d go..goes to show how this is crazy”. The track “Bound” even accomplishes this to a certain degree as well while it seems to lament a lot of what’s past while contemplating what’s to happen next in the speaker’s life. And of course, it’s hard to ignore Millan’s [finally] formally recorded cover of Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Follow You into the Dark”, a fan favourite for live performances.
It’s made rather clear in interviews and performances that Amy Millan is a rather well-adjusted figure. Yet her strong songwriting suggests she’s not above taking a serious look at the good and bad in life for the purposes of bettering one’s self. One can only imagine the pain that must have occurred for a warm and inviting voice like Millan’s to be so averse to something so as to call for the total burial of certain painful memories in her life. Speaking of album curiosities, the album cover itself is an interesting choice, for it’s not every day that a country album’s cover features a close-up of an elephant when mention of such a creature does not seem literally present in any of it’s songs. Perhaps it’s to signify the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about? The memories that seem to have this massive lumbering presence that are spilling out into present reality? Perhaps it’s instead the focus on the almost lattice-like network of glaring wrinkles in the skin, paralleling the notion of age and experience, of a facade that’s been worn and eroded by age and time. On top of that, it’s an asymmetrical view of the elephant that we’re treated to, as if to suggest the memory of something that’s incongruous with the rest of the speaker on this album.
Despite the emotional frankness of “Bruised Ghosts”, its overall messages remains a little unclear. Perhaps Amy Millan composed it to contemplate the ghosts that have spent far too much time exploring her past, returning to her present state-of-mind in some crippled fashion, asking to be revisited and pondered again. Whatever her reasons, Millan appears to have no difficulty displaying a calm bravado when it comes to exploring her past and the wounds it has suffered. In fact, this is where she shines like a star (if you’ll pardon the indirect pun), when any musician will in fact, when such liberating honesty is displayed in their work.
(8.5/10)
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