- At ten tracks long, Totally Mild’s sophomore release Her offers more in thirty-four minutes than lesser bands endeavour to produce in careers spanning decades. Her chronicles the intersection of taking a wrecking ball to your life for self-destruction’s sake, or settling for the structure and security of the traditional family framework. Questioning the value in the white picket fence versus the hyper-blaze of artistic chaos, of identity, of independence, of being female and being queer.
Prefaced by singles From One Another, Lucky Stars and Today Tonight, Her pulls Totally Mild’s sonic vision into sharp focus. The Melbourne four piece elaborate on the undulating textured rhythms they’re known for with ethereal, layered vocal beds and punctuate the cuts with swooping synths and ringing guitars.
Lyrically, the record leans heavily on front woman Elizabeth Mitchell’s struggle trying to qualify queerness and domesticity. Exemplified in track More, droning guitars are juxtaposed by Mitchell’s cavernous vocals that drawl “Here I am before you / Always asking for more / I will always want more.“
To describe Mitchell’s vocals as angelic feels derivative, unoriginal, and frankly, an injustice; but as her voice blooms on closing track Down Together, its a cinch. Spacious and hymnal, keys drone, and plucky guitars propel the languid melody and the album to a tentative close.
Her brims with simmering tension, specifically composed to unsettle and make you question your own values. Just like the choices queer folk and women make on a daily basis, from the miniscule to the life changing: ‘toast for breakfast?’ or ‘Do I want a family’, Her is sacrificial and deliberate, beautiful and calculated, it acknowledges that life and it’s fraying edges cannot be slotted effortlessly into a box, and the struggles of desiring too much sometimes feels like settling for nothing at all.
- Fiona Priddey.