Sometimes an album is so blunt and uncompromising in its personal content that you feel a bit like a voyeur just for hearing it.
This can result in the uncomfortable listener filing it away for good, hoping the artist will take his or her problems to a therapist next time. But a gifted singer-songwriter will find the universal and the humourous in the bleakest moments, making the entire experience a healing one for both performer and audience.
With her fourth album (only her third containing original material), Martha Wainwright makes the most effective use of her gifts: the lyrically confessional and brutally frank Come Home to Mama is a deeply moving album that transcends one person?s upheaval.
Two almost simultaneous life-changing events ? the birth of her son, Arcangelo, and the death of her mother, Kate McGarrigle ? provide the emotional backdrop here. The eerily beautiful Proserpina, McGarrigle?s last composition, is the disc?s centerpiece, while the languid All Your Clothes and the bass-driven, club-ish I Wanna Make an Arrest (on which Wainwright wails like Yoko Ono) also confront loss.
How much of it is fodder for gossip? What are we to make of lines like ?My marriage is failing, but I keep trying all the time,? in All Your Clothes, or ?My husband?s been lyin? and cheatin?/ I turned my cheek and reason/ I change my tune every day,? from the quite beautiful Everything Wrong, in which the singer confesses her fears to her child, all the while trying to play the protector?
And what about the zinger from the catchy, emotionally ambivalent Can You Believe It (?I really like the makeup sex/ It?s the only kind I ever get?)? That self-deprecating, darkly funny line says more about tension in a relationship than most writers can get into an entire song?
Wainwright has said she likes to put a twist in her autobiographical material (see the interview accompanying this review), so the literal truth of such lyrics probably shouldn?t be the focus. And when the words have the kind of wit and resonance these do, the best strategy is to look for yourself in them.
Musically, the move toward a more electro-pop sound, with keyboards dominating the arrangements instead of guitars, is an inspired one. Producer Yuka Honda has made many wise choices in these 10 tracks. Among the more arresting touches are the way she frames opener I Am Sorry with a bronto backbeat and encourages Wainwright to find her inner Kate Bush in the vocal approach, the layering of keys over a simple chord progression in the gloomy Leave Behind and the cartoonish tension that ignites the macabre Four Black Sheep.
With Come Home to Mama, Wainwright has turned the confessional album, too often something to be dreaded, into a place where we can find a bit of comfort and catharsis.
Rating: ****
Podworthy: Proserpina
Watch for our interview with Martha Wainwright Saturday in the print version of the Gazette and at montrealgazette.com.
(Martha Wainwright performs Nov. 5 at 9 p.m. at Corona Theatre, 2490 Notre Dame St. W. Tickets cost $27.50. Call 514-790-2525 or visit theatrecorona.com.)
Come Home to Mama will be available Oct. 16. Here?s the video for Proserpina:
Click here to listen to the album on the NPR Web site.
Bernard Perusse
Twitter: @bernieperusse
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