Getting the voice into order…
[Video][Website]
[6.38]
Cédric Le Merrer: According to the Wikipedia page of the book that gave this song its title, in Late Victorian Holocaust, Mike Davis “explores the impact of colonialism and the introduction of capitalism, and the relation with famine in particular”. But I must not have been the only one who’d never heard of the book, and the gravity pull of Marianne Faithful’s character is such that like me a lot of people have probably interpreted “late Victorian” as “very, very late” — or the 1970s, really. Starvation just another word for withdrawal. Either way, the music may be ghostly but the piano is resolute, and Marianne’s voice resigned. Imperialism and drug crazes, starvation and withdrawal are all products of inescapable capitalism. Your dreams are sleep to keep, because There Is No Alternative.
[9]
Mark Sinker: A semi-late Elizabethan non-holocaust: my friend T helped out tending Meanwhile Park for a time a few years back — it’s near Portobello Road — and we often still go over the canal and drink coffee together in the little Lebanese teashop in Golborne Road. So the names have the aura they have for me, and not the aura that’s needed, and maybe for that reason this seems mostly schtick and flim-flam, Marianne’s velvet croak notwithstanding.
[6]
Megan Harrington: Marianne Faithfull’s voice wears its age in a way few women are ever allowed. She’s as craggy and tar-stained as any Dylan or Cohen but she’s not a comforting or maternal presence the way her male peers are largely grandfatherly at their advanced age. Part of that is due to her partnership with Nick Cave, a songwriter who’s always had an old woman or two haunting him. Together, “Late Victorian Holocaust” rattles the floorboards and shakes the cupboards. Faithfull is both self-possessed and unhinged, spectral and mortal. This late-career flourish has produced some of the best work in both artists’ catalogues and it feels rare and exciting to hear these two find each other after so many decades apart.
[9]
Anthony Easton: Faithfull’s loss of voice is one of her great gifts, moving from a great singer with a decent voice in songs like “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan,” to the best punk album about female rage ever, to one of the great interpreters of Kurt Weill, almost as good as Lenya. Over the past decade, she has carefully picked out writers and producers who remind her of the cabaret stars, and she has moved her shipwrecked voice closer to those shores. That she managed to dig out the Marxist urban critic Mike Davis’s evocative title, and made it about personal erotics instead of public politics, complicates an artist who has never been simple. That she has managed to last longer, done more work, and not really released a bad album for most of her life, suggests a radical endurance that is profoundly under-discussed. In this season of six hours of Dylan wankery and zombie Stones (yes, like zombie capitalism), this makes me genuinely angry.
[9]
Thomas Inskeep: I love Faithfull and Broken English is a totem, but this is no Broken English. There’s barely a song here, just a few barely-connected elements (a violin poking its head in, some dull piano chords, “moody” atmospherics), with Faithfull singing undergrad poetry atop it.
[2]
Alfred Soto: Nick Cave seems like an ideal collaborator — on first listen at any rate. Not as insufferable as when he croaks his own Death Valley ’69 takes on American fatalism that fascinate Europeans, but he still indulges an artist who thinks anyone should still mention Swinging London and heroin in the lead graf. I like my Faithfull with a little pep. 2002’s Kissin’ Time, in part produced by Jarvis Cocker, Beck, and Billy Corgan, let her rasp behind synths. Here she sounds “classy” and desiccated.
[4]
Mallory O’Donnell: Lacy stringwork and methodical, sombre pacing underscore a Bowie/Brel/Faithfull-esque narrative of pleasure and hunger, memory and sweet little sleep. MF sounds raw as ever but with a wistfulness that cuts elegantly through the bitter recitation, pal.
[7]
Brad Shoup: To fall asleep in a light snow, to remember what kept you warm once upon a time. To snap awake, and recall that you’ve commissioned a tune that freezes you in glass and presses echoes into service as ghosts, once again.
[5]