Musi
Fighting Words
by Nick Bollinger
A stunning debut album about the repairing of a life.
There has been enough ugly music made by people fantasising about various psychotic states. (Name the death metal band of your choice.) Yet here is an album born out of an actual episode of clinical depression that, against all odds, is a thing of beauty.
Auckland musician Renee-Louise Carafice was institutionalised on her 22nd birthday with severe depression. Many of the songs on her debut album were written during the period that followed, as a way of repairing her shattered life.
Yet Carafice’s songs are nothing like the hell-visions of metal, or those my-life-as-an-open-diary ditties that have come to define the singer-songwriter genre. Carafice’s album is as poetic as it is candid, comforting as it is chilling, and musically stunning.
Renee-Louise Carafice Tells You to Fight! had a long gestation. The incident that spawned these songs took place in 2003. After spending almost two years in fruitless search of funding, Carafice won a private grant that meant she could realise her ambition to record at Steve Albini’s legendary Electrical Audio studio in Chicago, the city she currently calls home. It took more than two more years for the album to be released, but the whole protracted process has been worth it.
Produced by Golden-horse guitarist Ben King, with fellow New Zealander and sometime Finn Brothers engineer Nick Abbot handling Albini’s vintage equipment, the result is a recording of exceptional warmth. Carafice’s voice and intricately finger-picked guitar are placed right in front of you, their confiding tones drawing you in. The American rhythm section and King’s electric guitar rise and fall with the dynamics of each song, allowing Carafice’s performances to range from a hush to a howl.
Though Carafice’s spell in hospital is the album’s central theme, her songs take many approaches.
Sometimes she casts her experiences in mythic terms, as in the opening song, The Girl/Saint/Sufferer. Yet rather than make grandiose claims for her own suffering, the song simply serves to universalise her experience.
At other times, she is shockingly particular. “I sing little songs to myself/to recall who the hell I am/I sing, my name is Renee and I know where I stand,” she intones from the depths of her incarceration in Hooded Song.
Carafice takes you in deep, not because she wants you to wallow in her pain, but because she has to show you where she has been in order to point the way through. The astonishing thing is that, for all its harrowing passages, the album ultimately offers comfort and solace.
“I heard you were thinking of killing yourself over some 16yearold girl, Boy/don’t go acting crazy now …” she cautions in (I’m Your) Bodhisattva, and with the soothing tones of someone who has had, in her words, “my share of medical jargon and sorrow”, she sounds a note of genuine hope.
But it is her melodies as much as her lyrics that can send a shiver. Sung in a voice alternately girlish and ancient, they start out like old folk tunes yet invariably make unexpected twists and turns.
Scattered through the set are a few songs, like the haunting, bluesy Sweet, the Leaves of Jamestown, that fall outside its central storyline. Happily, these are as compelling as the rest, a sign that whatever life throws at her in future, good or evil, Renee-Louise Carafice should continue to find plenty of reasons to make extraordinary music.
