- When you’re creating political music, it can be a hard task to make something that will open a dialogue, start a conversation, without coming across as too harsh or opinionated: you don’t want people to hate you before they’ve had a chance to hear what you’re saying. Factor in making music that appeals to your fan base, is contemporarily accessible and captures your personality as an artist, and you’ve got some really hard yards on your hands. Amanda Palmer however, has managed to create exactly that. Her first solo record in six years is a raw yet digestible body of work that says all the right things - even the ones you don’t want to hear.
This record is at the core a classic Amanda Palmer album, but is a step past her older records which were more light hearted and were decorated with prettier arrangements to distract from the harshness of her voice and lyrics. Drowning In the Sound is an almost six minute track put together from comments from her crowd funding platform to create a hard hitting lyrical journey that’s sprinkled with jagged production, turning the already ominous track into an uneasy, tumultuous chapter in the record.
Palmer is often regarded as outspoken - her voice is normally the main thing recognised in her music - whether that is her imperfect vocals or her heavy lyrics. However, this record really showcases her skills as a pianist and her soft arrangements are the often only musical accompaniment for the majority of the record. She has the innate ability to select the perfect builds and counter-melodies to carry her often drawn out vocal lines. The record has a long tracklist, but half of these songs are musical interludes, which provide a moment of space between the heavy lyrical tracks - they give you a moment to digest and think about what she’s saying before launching into the next chapter. Ironically, the title track “There Will Be No Intermission” is in fact one of these “intermission” tracks.
Amanda Palmer's approach to lyric composition is an unusual, but incredibly effective one. Her ability to compose lines of imperfect rhyme - or choose combinations of words that seemingly don’t match together at all are what create such impact in her songs. Often switching between first and third person, and at times breaking the fourth wall, make it seem like you’re listening to an erratic journal entry - the kind you write when you’re having a quarter life crisis about the state of society but don’t know what to do about it. Her songs are often without the instant gratification of a catchy melodic hook or a witty chorus line, but instead are full of deeply insightful comments and questions about the state of the world.
Everything about Amanda Palmer’s latest record There Will Be No Intermission is imperfect, which in a way, is kinda what makes this such a perfect record. Her crackling vocals, unconventional rhymes and slightly out of time accompaniment all come together in a package that slices open the cracks in the mask. You don’t have to be chanting at a protest to start demanding answers to your questions and Palmer has managed to take this knowledge and put together six years worth of painful realisations into one full-length record that leaves you not only agreeing with the issues being raised, but creating your own questions as well.
- Olivia Shoesmith.