The Smallest Room
  • Menu

    Music
    Arts
    About
    Travel
    Teach

  • MUSIC
    • record reviews
    • LIVE REVIEWS
    • features
  • ARTS
  • About
  • Travel
  • Teach
0

Grand Salvo – Sea Glass

First published in The Guardian Australia, January 2019


Sea glass. A sharp, human thing worn smooth by nature. A still thing enclosing so much time and tumult. When, six years after I fell hard for Grand Salvo’s sixth album, Slay Me In My Sleep, I saw the name of this follow-up record, the metaphor made sense before I’d even heard the songs. “I listened on the weekend and it gutted me,” said a fellow AMP judge, so I held off a while.

Grand Salvo is baroque folk singer and songwriter Paddy Mann. My last sighting of him was in Tamara Saulwick’s 2015 show, Endings. The only lyric I noted – “a note that never ends, a line that never bends” – pops up on Sea Glass, proof these songs tumbled in the brine awhile.

“The waves upon the rocks/Never, ever stop” he sings on The Unquiet Tide and, similarly, he rarely offers the relief of a chorus, just verses lapping in, making his gentle songs an insistent listen. Some will find his boyish voice twee; his songs too tender. Though both are balanced here by radiant female harmonies with the sheeny, heart-bright hue of Abba or the Mama and the Papas.

A decade ago, Mann released an album called Death, though life’s cycle seems a permanent rumination. I don’t find his songs sad anymore. At some point, I moved past fear of where the axe might fall next to a more sensible practice: a kind of stockpiling of the things that get one through when big grief comes. And this album feels like one of those things.

Share Tweet

Kate

You Might Also Like

  • LIVE REVIEWS

    Floors of Heaven underwater concert (Woolloomooloo Bay)

  • features

    The ‘Yolŋu surf rock’ of Yothu Yindi’s next generation

  • LIVE REVIEWS

    William Crighton (The Great Club)

Search

Twitter

Tweets by @smallestroom

Recent articles

  • Floors of Heaven underwater concert (Woolloomooloo Bay) February 19, 2022
  • The ‘Yolŋu surf rock’ of Yothu Yindi’s next generation February 17, 2022
  • A gentle hidden gem: a visitor’s guide to the NSW far south coast January 8, 2022
  • ‘An inscrutable and open-ended riddle’: the life and art of Jeffrey Smart December 11, 2021
  • Trekking the Great Ocean Walk: ‘Stand with no land mass between your sweaty skin and Antarctica’ December 7, 2021
  • MUSIC
    • record reviews
    • LIVE REVIEWS
    • features
  • ARTS
  • About
  • Travel
  • Teach

My name is Kate Hennessy. I am a freelance arts and travel writer and music critic. I contribute to Guardian Australia, The Sydney Morning Herald/The Age, The Saturday Paper, The Australian, The Australian Financial Review, The Wire (UK), NME and more.

Latest posts

  • Floors of Heaven underwater concert (Woolloomooloo Bay)

    February 19, 2022
  • The ‘Yolŋu surf rock’ of Yothu Yindi’s next generation

    February 17, 2022
  • A gentle hidden gem: a visitor’s guide to the NSW far south coast

    January 8, 2022
  • ‘An inscrutable and open-ended riddle’: the life and art of Jeffrey Smart

    December 11, 2021
  • Trekking the Great Ocean Walk: ‘Stand with no land mass between your sweaty skin and Antarctica’

    December 7, 2021

Twitter

Tweets by @smallestroom

Search