Wandering songwriter returns with first album in a decade: lessons in melodic self-definition ensue.
“I don’t plan, and I don’t plan to stop”. The opening line to the first and title track of My Mother’s Name may offer the listener a glimpse into the singer-songwriter’s manifesto, and could go some way to summarising her peripatetic lifestyle. Born into the indigenous Inuk population of Greenland but a citizen of the world, Nielsen has chosen not to settle anywhere for too long, the itinerant aesthetic lending grease to the wheels of her music. Along the way, she’s been a band leader, a film and theatre actor and has involved herself in various art projects highlighting the plight of indigenous populations. Nielsen’s dance card, then, is full; we should be thankful she’s been back in the studio for this, her third full-length outing with The Deer Children.
Given such polyglot building blocks, it comes as no surprise that the music contained within Nielsen’s first album in a decade is representative of everywhere and nowhere (baby). Wilfully unfocused, its bedrock lies somewhere in the grey borders between folk, pop and the songwriter schools of composition and melody, occasionally all of them in one song. The album rewards repeat listening and is very much a product of our time, several songs anchored by an uneasy tension, a feeling that something’s not quite right but needs to be called out. It’s not difficult to sympathise with that in these strange days.
The aforementioned title track is a propulsive, layered opener, an uneasy slide guitar puncturing a marching percussion as Nielsen claims her identity with a vocal authority the music refuses to rubber-stamp; a tit-for-tat contrast that occurs frequently throughout the album to keep us on our toes. Time To Time’s synth notes bubble over a barely-there click track and choppy chords supporting perhaps the record’s most explicit lyric: “While we wait willingly, our only worth is your judgement and condescending tone”. Even here, though, it’s vague enough to allow us to apply our own meaning. The repeated chant in the middle-eight of “Save yourself, from time to time” begins as a warning but feels more of a plea as it continues. Paint starts like a lost Crowded House B-side and evolves, with a fabulous, howling guitar line crying out for knowledge, coupled with a sumptuous vibraphone melody in the coda that sticks like glue for days between your ears.
Evident in these opening tracks, and apparent in all that follow them, are the small instances of ambience and anti-melody that weave in and out of each song’s core like radio emissions gone haywire. The pedal steel notes and synth glitches in Low (whose melody line sounds uncannily like the slow, folkier cousin to Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy); “Someone told me once you’re only tested for what you can / Not what you can’t”; the mellotron backing on the acoustic-driven Wild, and the frankly disturbing percussion and cello scraping on Blame, Nielsen desperately attempting to persuade herself that “It’s funny to discover we didn’t need each other”. Individually, these moments of alt-creativity stamp Nielsen’s originality through the album and make each song a delight to explore. Hats must be tipped to The Deer Children, who marshal the range of eclectic instrumentation, quirky rhythm, and side-adventures with a practised ease; Nielsen is rightly the focus, but this is a band.
Elsewhere, Nuna Pii is sung in Nielsen’s native Greenlandic over a slow tread rhythm and plucked notes like coiled springs being flicked by an impatient cat. By the closer, Up All Night, we’re partying with our foot gently on the accelerator, driven by a military rhythm and simple hook sung across waves of ambience, cello and muted saxophone that rise to a cliff-edge finale; “We showed up again outside your door / Drinks in your hand / Just like before / We’re up all night”. As a chest-baring statement of after-hours frivolity, AC/DC it’s not, but it is an upbeat note on which to bow out after a studied, determined and often very beautiful attempt to construct some meaning out of the chaos of modern life.
