Half Waif - See You At The Maypole

If Half Waif’s aim was to reflect her surroundings while writing ‘See You At The Maypole’ in its final form, then she can consider it a task well done. The seventeen track album is so relentless in its sadness, so emotionally fraught that – owing in part to Nandi Rose’s crystalline, piercing vocal – it’s as if the record could shatter at any moment. She makes use of varied sonic textures: the demo-style drum track of ‘Big Dipper’; the minimalism of ‘Sunset Hunting’; the almost wrong-speed hyperpop beat of ‘Ephemeral Being’; and perhaps most effectively the synth pattern in ‘I-90’, which echoes the bright lights shining through during a night time drive. But the record’s black cloud remains – in fact, it is only in closer ‘March Grass’, with its rollicking drum pattern, that any release emerges. Its lyrics mirror the tone - they reference her miscarriage directly in opener ‘Fog Winter Balsam Jade’ (“You made me a mother”) and ‘Mother Tongue’ (“The red water / Flowed from me”), and elsewhere more generally: see ‘Slow Music’’s “I’m not stuck / I’m just taking my time”; ‘Velvet Coil’’s “I don’t wanna talk / I just wanna hold still”; and ‘The Museum’’s “I wish I was laughing / I just cannot see a way out of this”. ‘See You At The Maypole’ is a challenging listen not through sound or even particularly subject matter, but in not reaching its end under a similarly black cloud as the record itself.