Hello Satellites; There's A Field | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- The last couple of years has provided an uncomfortable context for all the music of the time. Whether quietly suffering or defiantly optimistic, every record is like a letter from the inside, a missive from an invisible prison. Some of us, however, have been captive for longer than this. Unseen chains reach back into the past, a cage that other people are only just discovering. Eva Popov’s whispered stream of sadness stretches back from Hello Satellite’s 2021 album There’s A Field to 2017’s Bright Face, connected by a brittle thread of truth: “I was never free.”

The enforced isolation is palpable in the absence of Georgia Harvey’s voice, which duetted with Eva across that last album and via the often curiously artificial samples of instruments taking the place of an ensemble; real collaborators who, for obvious reasons, could not be there. Still there’s moments of that defiant optimism here too: There’s A Field looks towards better places and that means more than finally being able to get out of the house. Certainly it means much more to Eva Popov, in some ways that aren’t immediately obvious, much more indeed.

I tried to piece together what’s been going on, from unguarded statements to the press like “At the time of writing I had a family, I was a friend, a wife and a mother, doing the best as I could through curating emotions and actions.” I don’t know exactly how much to read into something like that, but it makes it sound like things have been very difficult indeed. This adds a real resonance and gravitas to songs like Something Dies, Something Heals. There’s an unreal quality to that one, opening the album with ethereal synths and backing vocals in a way that feels like the aftermath of an accident. A shellshocked Popov murmurs: “Let it go, you want it too much.” No Delivery pushes pretty much the same message, even though it sounds completely different as Popov’s nerves go into spasm, delivering a manic, comedy electro-funk. Thief completes the bipolar arc, crashing back down to reality or as Popov puts it “turns heaven into hell.” The downtempo beats, sweet acoustic guitar and synths take the edge off what would otherwise be brutal and still is, if you listen to the vocals repeat “Where is my redemption now?” over and again, dragging out the song’s finale.

The album’s title-track continues the dominating theme of the record: an exploration  of longing, grief and that search for redemption, by telling it, by suffusing it with humanity, by transforming it into music. “There’s a field and we’re driving through it / Where everything that we lost will come back” sings Popov, casting her mind far away from what she’s actually feeling. That kind of wish-fulfillment also rings out of Water, Salt, Light, Grace, “Oh my love, oh my love, what can I offer you?” It’s as sweetly art-pop as you’ll get here and let me tell you, when I listened to it as a single, missing the nuances supplied by the context of the record, that was a wholly different experience.

Increasingly, there’s an elegiac quality to songs that appear towards the end of There’s A Field. It’s like the stages of grief have slowly been ticking over and now, inescapably, acceptance has arrived. All the genre experiments, the wilder emotions, these dissolve into studious folk and classic singer-songwriter fare. Ghostly piano harmonies and otherworldly production warmth glow in numbers like Marlo, Missing Piece or All Water Returns. There’s a kind of praxis between everyday life and desire that leaks out of intimate, folky moments like the song Friend: the gentle beauty of what might have been, lost, only living on in the mind. A long twilight dapples the songs and it feels like the end when Eva sings “everything that you love, everything that you’ve done / Turns to blood, turns to burn / Turns to prayer, turns to sun / To return to the earth” or “Like you’re nothing at all” on All Water Returns.

In all this eulogising, is there a way back? Does painting grief with a rosy glow lead to redemption? Hello Satellites’ There’s A Field raged in its chains, trying to beat fate, but only to begin with. It’s as though, with time, it learns to accept these shackles: it’s all the salve there is. There’s a great sadness in that, but also, in Eva Popov’s hands, a great beauty. For better or for worse, the world will be what it is, there’s a limit to what you can do to change it. The same is true of people, the same is true of ourselves. From that we may never be free, so in it, we must find our consolation.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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