There might be no other folk-pop songwriter who scrawls the poetry of disappointment with as much consistency as Peter Milton Walsh, the frontman of The Apartments. It’s not just that he lost a young son to illness in 1999: in moods and themes, 2015’s No Song, No Spell, No Madrigal and this year’s In and Out of the Light don’t sound like distant successors to 1997’s Apart.
Perhaps Walsh has always felt this way, and the world has failed to improve his perspective. The newest album’s first track, “Pocketful of Sunshine,” confirms this failure, emphasizing how Walsh’s warble seems reluctant to awaken dreams and desires that should’ve been allowed to die a long time ago. That warble, strained by experience, is huskier than it was on the Apartments’ 1985 debut LP, The Evening Visits…and Stays for Years. But Walsh surrounds it with the familiarity of strummed acoustic guitars, pensively tuneful brass and rhythms that rarely move faster than the heart at rest.
Sometimes, as in “What’s Beauty to Do?,” the melodies are as pretty as anything he contributed to a circa-1978 stint in the Go-Betweens—like The Apartments, an Australian-origin indie band more lauded than heard—and sometimes, as in “Write Your Way Out of Town,” the music moves with the sophistication of Steely Dan. Emotionally, Walsh doesn’t so much sink into despair as resign himself to it, whether dissociating from his earlier self amid the twilight hues of “Butterfly Kiss” or letting the chamber-pop elements of “I Don’t Give a Fuck About You Anymore” belie the angry song title and mostly vituperative lyrics.
In and Out of the Light ends with, aptly, “The Fading Light,” a glimmer of hope slowly extinguished by stark piano and Walsh’s vocal weariness. Like the rest of this album, it depicts all loss in life as, to modify a Bellovian phrase, the dark backing a mirror requires for us to see the worth of existence.
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