Chadwick, Sarah Mary

Chadwick, Sarah Mary

Me And Ennui Are Friends, Baby

Rice Is Nice / Ba Da Bing!

Me And Ennui Are Friends, Baby is the latest full-length from New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based singer-songwriter, Sarah Mary Chadwick, whose brutally honest songwriting has cast her contrary to the gentleness of most current music. Comprised entirely of minimal solo piano arrangements, the album is despondently clear-eyed and smirkingly self-deprecating, completing a trilogy of records that started with The Queen Who Stole The Sky recorded on Melbourne Town Hall’s grand organ, and her only outing to date featuring a full band, Please Daddy. Each record has followed Chadwick’s internal processing after a traumatic event, with Chadwick’s zeal for psychoanalysis front and center. On Ennui, Chadwick presents an exacting intensity with her choice to pare back to piano and vocals. It’s in this stark setting that she focuses on the attempt she made on her life in 2019.  The methods Chadwick employed here contrast those of her previous full-band record, which thrust her into a very different world of rehearsal, planning, restraint and control as a functional tool. The result, 2020’s critically acclaimed Please Daddy, was her most aching and engaging achievement to date: “a raw, often unnerving experience,” which “delivers compelling and uplifting catharsis” (Mojo). Recording Ennui shortly after those sessions, Chadwick concludes her trilogy by returning to the most immediate compositional process she can muster, doing it alone, with less between her and the microphone than ever before.  Joined by long time production collaborators, Me And Ennui was mastered by David Walker at Stepford Audio and mixed and recorded...

Chadwick, Sarah Mary

Roses Always Die

Rice Is Nice

Following three critically acclaimed solo albums, Sarah Mary Chadwick’s Roses Always Die expands on the quiet intensity of her previous work, exploring memory, grief and personal analysis. Her unflinching approach to songwriting introduces complex, often difficult subject matter as vivid as it is understated. An old immobile organ provides the only accompaniment to her voice, giving the album an eerie consistency that perfectly underpins the diverse, open-ended narratives that run through each song. The second album recorded with Geoffrey O’Connor (Crayon Fields), it has a more organic sound than the wall of synths used on 9 Classic Tracks, with most songs comprised of just one voice and a live ’70s Yamaha analogue organ—a huge, heavy, double-tiered beast with built-in percussion beats and pedal bass —recorded on site in the loungeroom at Sarah’s house in Collingwood, Melbourne. Unembellished and at times brutally sparse, these songs are whittled down to their surprisingly hooky, heartbreaking, wry, bare-boned essentials. The sentiments are personal and the refrains are huge and ambitious, while Sarah’s voice is strong and vulnerable — it croons and croaks and cracks, conjuring grief and memory. “Sarah Mary Chadwick’s new album is a beautiful and insightful collection of songs. Her work achieves a poignancy which is distinct as it is rare.” —Henry Rollins

Chadwick, Sarah Mary

9 Classic Tracks

Siltbreeze

As moving as Kim Blackburn, Sarah Mary Chadwick is back with her second official full-length release following her debut solo LP Eating for Two (Bedroom Suck Records, 2012). While preserving her distinctive traits of bare-skinned honesty and visceral delivery, 9 Classic Tracks sees Chadwick venture into decidedly more lush territory—her unmistakably raw vocals present this time through a vaseline filter and with an air of reflection indicative of both artistic growth and intimate evolution. In a new collaboration for Chadwick, 9 Classic Tracks was recorded and produced by Geoffrey O’Connor (The Crayon Fields) and mastered by David Walker. “Where do I fit in?” she inquires on the opening track “Ask Walt,” setting the tone for what soon becomes clear is an album of great introspection. But rather than alienating the listener with inward-facing questions, Chadwick’s astute observations on relationships and the utter messiness of love are both deeply idiosyncratic and universally relatable. In the thick of the album, the mercurial fifth track “Same Old Fires” moves from a hymn-like whisper into an uncharacteristically sunny backing beat layered contrarily behind emotional cries of “I’m tired of feeling the same old burns / From wandering through the same old fires,” before transitioning into a similar lament in the sixth track, “I’m Back Where I Was.”  9 Classic Tracks reaches a turning point with “I’m Like an Apple with No Skin,” a song that will resonate with anyone who has walked away from a relationship in the name of...