Album Review: River Dark

Last year I caught alt-folk sweetheart Greta O’Leary performing with Fables at Meow. At that stage she’d just released two tracks and was ‘road-testing’ material made during sessions with producer/musician extraordinaire Jol Mulholland. Finally, her highly anticipated debut album, River Dark, drops across streaming platforms and vinyl today.

Let’s start with the sound. There’s some great talent on this record. Most of the players are virtually household names. There’s the aforementioned producer Jol Mulholland, whose paws are all over this. And then add Cass Basil (Tiny Ruins), Alastair Deverick (Come Together), Callum Passells (he of Hans Pucket) and Anita Clark (aka Motte). Recorded and produced at The Lab Studios and, in the case of last year’s single Baby I’m a Singer, Roundhead Studios, as well. There were also contributions from De Stevens, the multi-talented Dave Khan, and record master Joe Lambert (which was done in New York, no less). She really had the dream team.

I know all of them and what they are capable of oh-so-well. Perhaps that set me up to be a little bit disappointed. I felt I was being teased – with flashes of great riffs that promised but never quite eventuated. Constraint is a constant that is well exploited. But then, I had to remember, this was O’Leary’s project. Done her way.

Lyrics are, on the whole fairly straight forward but you can’t help thinking there’s some hidden layers – as if the astute is hiding is plain sight. But the most remarkable aspects are in O’Leary’s clear and unmistakable vocals, which really stand out. Perhaps that, on reflection, is why the band hold back a smidge. Because there’s room here for the silence and the calm. “I was a child shy,” she says, “and unclear, completely confused, absolutely not on board with future, with goals or activity. I was in the field below the house, I was at the pond with the dog, I played make believe longer than most. I was taught to be quiet.”

She addresses the beauty of silence on the new single IDKALA – “I don’t know about love anymore, What’s wrong with the quiet, I don’t mind it”. It’s a comforting song. Almost a campfire sing-along – for the all gothic in us. Maybe that’s the prominence of her guitar. But the subject is haunting. Yes – spooky. “All I want is a quiet, dark heart… born of the underworld.” The additional, breathy vocals from Arahi helps to flesh it out I wanted more. More drama, a drop – between the statement and the reality, or a test, perhaps, a lead then a twist. Still, if Nadia Reid wrote this, she’d be very happy. The ever-present slide guitar is a spectre on this and many other songs on this album. And towards the end, there’s a hint of Alastair Deverick’s lingering sax, similar to that on Bowie’s Lazarus.

Once shyness was a burden, but on this album, it’s the dry reserve that is a strength. Her phrasing makes every word ever more poignant.

Most of her songs carry that shoulder chip in some way. “All of my life I knew I wasn’t right,” O’Leary acknowledges on the single called The Greatest Peace I’ve Ever Known. There’s a definite link of irony to her upbringing in a strict household. It hints at breaking away from some cult or bad family culture. I wonder how much of that feeds into her song writing. This is a breakaway. “I’m done being one you understand / Keep your cards, your tricks and your blame / Feeling so settled, I know just what to do / And I’ll do it and it’s getting good”. Is this a retaliation of some kind? She plays with religious rhetoric, twisting it in on itself with a gentle cleverness: “Ever wearing the sign of anything by divine / superficial kinds just pass me by”. Even the song’s title seems like a sermon’s mockery, somehow.

Musically, the song is quite haunting, the piano’s keys spacious, O’Leary’s voice eerie, vulnerable. Tender by also gently defiant. It’s also worth checking out the self-directed video, shot with assistance from Adam Rohe (DOP) and featuring Monica Evans, Sam McGlennon, Rata Gordan, and this mysterious white hooded figure called ‘Spook’. I’m not exactly sure what ‘Spook’s’ role is but they remind me, disturbingly, of scenes from Mississippi Burning.

The clearest revelation of her church mouse upbringing is revealed in the blatant matters of fact on Baptised At The Desktop Computer. Although the introduction is so banal, it’s loaded with meaning and irony. It’s based on a true story. Her father came home with a bottle of holy water and interrupted 12-year-old Greta and her sister whilst they were playing the popular 90’s game, The Sims, on the family’s computer. “He thought the devil was in me”, O’Leary has said. This was a bizarre event, given no one actually went to church much before that. What drove him to do that? What gives the song more humour is when the song picks up carried along by some dinky 80’s digital blips, provided appropriately by Mulholland’s original 70’s Roland cr8000 drum machine, Cass Basil’s swaggering bass (as she channels 50’s jazz icons Jaco Pastorius and Charles Mingus), some ‘Southern preacher’ lap steel and strumming guitars that, disturbingly, remind me of those house bands that are popular in modern evangelical churches. I guess that was the point. All part of O’Leary’s dead pan and signature tongue-in-cheek song writing.

The song, O’Leary has said, was written whilst in a “slightly delirious, flu-induced state – a curious writing process fitting for the eccentric new track.”

This song also has a video. This time, O’Leary is dressed in her Sunday Best, addressing us from what looks like a home office (It was actually filmed at Tamaki Makaurau’s infamous Junk and Disorderly). Maybe it’s the colours, her dress, the subject matter. It all has this weird, disturbing, exploitative, undercurrent. It begins with a neon sign: “Sin!” Absolving is a common theme of preoccupation throughout. And a target for O’Leary’s dark humour.

The title track, I heard, live, performed on just two guitars. River Dark, was introduced as a “plunging into the darkness to find light.” The idea was there. There, finally, is fulfilment. Careful picking, a quavering violin, that haunting slide guitar, and lyrics that colour the image of some dark pagan ritual. Is this the voice of a deity or a lost soul. I like the way there’s ambiguity. That I can stumble into misinterpretation yet arrive satisfied with my conclusion. However, you be the judge: “Don’t get in the River Dark, resist your passage / All I dreamed of, all my life, I have arrived / I am divine in the like / In the dim light water and poetry gave me a life.”

A recent release, Prelude, begins with the starkest treatment, with just enough reverb to suggest an empty hall before Cass Basil warms up the room with a blanket of bass and Mulholland pierces the still air with drones of ethereal sound sprites.

Irony presents on the swelling country swinger Sleep Alone, with wonderful contradictions: “I won’t be yours and you won’t be mine / But I’m afraid of the dark”. “Across town, you’ve got your own bed, with all your own lovely things surrounding it / Must in mine instead? / Baby, it’s a cliché / Can we just make love during the day? Will you measure me with subtlety, not only proximity?”

There’s another piece of dark humour on the self-deprecating number, So Lucky. Perhaps one of the misunderstood songs on the album. Lines like “I’m so lucky, my baby left me / not gonna be no ball and chain / I’m so lucky my baby left me / gonna start all over again.” Sounds like the makings of a good ol’ dusty blues track. I really wanted O’Leary to get a bit grittier. Denied, alas. She was going in a different direction. At this time a bluesy, grungy guitar riff tries to penetrate but never quite pushes through.

‘All I really want’, O’Leary concludes on the final track Good Girl, “Is to be a good girl, but I don’t know how. So much darkness already / barely made it past twelve.” Sung dead pan, the final spit in on the shoes to those that once held her back. There’s an obvious link to the computer baptism thing. Also, more references to her upbringing and the expectations lavished upon her. You can’t help thinking there’s some kind of resistance to some kind of piousness. That’s settled with the beautiful choral harmonies that wrap up this record.

Described in the publicity as “tender, steadfast, unravelling’” these nine tracks are brooding, calming and sometimes a little unsettling. She invites her listeners “into the soft, dark and idiosyncratic corners of her inner world.” Instrumentation is promised to be a soaring experience. There are moments of this for sure. However, I did feel a little bit let down, wanting the guitar parts to be more pronounced and a bit more grungy. Would that have overshadowed the singer? Maybe. But that’s only a tiny quibble.

It’s been several years in the making, bringing together songs released and performed several years ago now. Was the journey worth it – absolutely. EPs and singles have gone before. But this is the debut album. A collection of ironic, delicate defiance by a songwriter who is pushing back against her the expectations of others, staking her own voice and musical territory.

This album will grow on you. Each listen reveals more. Return again, explore the layers, enjoy the musicianship. But remember that despite the very obvious skills of her band, this is very clearly Greta O’Leary’s work. It’s her stamp, her talent, her name, her style. A brilliant debut, indeed.