Dear Reader - Rivonia

There’s no room for personal interpretation on Dear Reader’s third studio album, ‘Rivonia’. This is a record about South Africa-born Cheri MacNeil’s (aka Dear Reader) experience of living in the enormous shadow of the apartheid, her take on her country’s past and how subjective and unreliable history can be.

It’s no political diatribe, though. It’s MacNeil’s memories, musings and makings; she paints pictures of her childhood, her classroom, the staple characters in her life and the part they played in moulding her. Against a simple backdrop of piano, violin and percussion, MacNeil’s voice sits right on the shoulder of the listener. It’s a priest-confessor sort of situation; the delivery of the songs is cathartic – the relief of divulging secrets.

The first single ‘Down Under, Mining’ is an ominous, rhythmic attack on the injustice of white man; multiple vocal lines repeat their indignant and painful cries against the ‘town of Johannes’, as the song gains a locomotive momentum. Urgent, travelling percussion, a means of escape, is a recurrent characteristic on ‘Rivonia’, particularly effective in ‘Cruelty On Beauty On’. MacNeil treads the difficult line between sinister and transformative; there are moments of dwelling on the terrible events that happened too nearby, but others of taking what has gone before and moving forward.

‘Good Hope’, along with a beautiful piano motif, makes surprising and extremely affecting use of a full choral section; the sense of human togetherness that it creates is unexpected in the context of the song and the album theme. It veers between melancholy sea shanty, and enormous film score, and yet it doesn’t feel strange. The vocal in this song sounds more than a little like Joanna Newsom, and works well. MacNeil’s voice is generally strong and easy to listen to, although that generic, slightly pained, female singer-songwriter accent has unfortunately crept in.

Other highlights include ‘Man Of The Book’, a more upbeat (and welcome) addition, and ‘Already Are’, an acoustic lullaby and duet. There is plenty of diversity on this album, musically, but not thematically.

The problem with choosing a theme as huge as this for an album, even though it is wisely being handled from a personal perspective, is that it can feel forced. Inevitable lyrical cliches arise when you’re talking about injustice and freedom, and they do grate. Fortunately, they’re few enough to avoid hampering enjoyment of what is otherwise an interesting record.