Amy Martin -- Bones
Amy Martin is so frank and sincere in her grief-filled album Bones, you may need to take a break, writes Stefanie Cuthbert
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Amy Martin’s second solo album, Bones, exists at the intersection of indie-folk and alt-country, with songs full of Appalachian poetry and washed in southern gothic. Like its namesake, the album is intimate and exposed, but full of tenacity and tensile strength, communicated through a voice halfway between Brandi Carlile and Lucinda Williams, but with a warble of grace of its own, reaching heights only the bald eagle has seen.
Album opener "Old Red" conjures a sense of freedom from the emotional pull of the pedal steel and the acoustic guitar conjuring a campfire setting. Yet like a photograph, the old truck and the father Martin laments only exists in memory, underpinning the song with a painful nostalgia.
The title track possesses a plaintive guitar that pulls instantly at the heart strings. “I’ve been chewing on the bones of Jesus / I wish I’d known to call it grief” sets the tenor for the whole album, a short but potent meditation on loss. Partway through, the song falls into a marching beat, transforming into a protest, before evolving again into a euphoric celebration of life not in spite of the bad times – the illness, loss, and distress – but because of it. The song’s spiritual sibling occurs later with "How Do I Move On?" capturing the rending of selfhood that occurs after losing someone, whether through death or the breakdown of a relationship.
"Give Me Hell" goes big on defiance, signalling that Martin is a queer artist here to take up more space. A contrast to the delicate banjo and violin of "Intervention" whose earnest lyrics go toe to toe with anything Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clarke, or any of country’s contemporary poets has penned.
The emotionality rises with "Writer’s Block," a song so frank and sincere you almost feel the need to switch it off. But the feeling held in Martin’s voice and the grounded images all beg you to keep listening. It’s a song that rebukes the notion that folk is mutually exclusive with the modern world, demonstrating it’s a means of fostering connection and externalising pain on the pathway towards healing. Although each song provides catharsis, here it’s the sonic equivalent of the cleansing after a long, much needed cry.
In only a few lines on "Oh No No" – “I don’t take my prescriptions, I smoke weed and stay stoned / I get high with my angel, leave my demons alone” – Martin captures the dissociative quality of living in the mid-2020s. In duet with grief, it results in a record that couldn’t nave been made at any other time.
Album closer "Under the Rubble" is the most surprising turn with a percussive stomp that’s closer to the country rock of Drive-By Truckers. The repeated phrase of "What if your kid was under the rubble" recalls the current news cycle of disasters and warzones, jolting the listener into attention. It leads to an abrupt end, one that serves as a call to action, a shove out the door, to go and make change.
