Aoife McAtamney’s debut album, Pink Breath, is part of a multifaceted project. With its accompanying film (directed by Wolf James), it seeks to set an immersive tone; a song cycle of sorts, it explores themes about the complications of the body, with a sense of reckonings and reclamations.
My Body, with its sound of a swirling storm, brews around McAtamney singing “my body is my home” accompanied by warm strings. Heal Me continues that stormy weather but leavens it with rich keys and sloping beats that convey an optimism, as does the jazz-inflected Hippy, with its slanty percussion that takes us into more surreal terrain.
Heart River is an interesting piece, with McAtamney’s repetitive chant of “drum, drum, drum, drum” setting a drone-like meditative tone, with a surprising skittish quality that complements her unwavering vocal. Sex in Bed is discordant and delicate; Space folds in glowing piano that sets us down into a torch song, a place where McAtamney’s collaborator Justin Vivian Bond ably steps, providing a lived-in elegant vocal, underpinned by Lucia Mac Partlin’s evocative fiddle, which adds another layer of poignancy.
Spoke is a highlight. A composition that swoops into choral territory, it is emblematic of the different musical leaves that this album has, with Simple Love as a slow build that leads to anthemic release, and the pared-back, more sombre Youth, with its forensic study of the past that contains stark lyrics detailing discomfiting memories.
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Song A is another highlight, a sort of companion piece to Spoke, where a gentle humming underpins a difficult subject. “Nobody wants to talk about it ... but everybody’s got something to say about it,” McAtamney sings as she explores the issue of abortion amid a soundscape of birdsong. That soundscape could represent a sense of personal freedom, but it is clearly about more than that – sadness and beauty and healing – revealing an epic quality about a subject that is as complicated as it is nuanced and personal, much like this record.
