Nothing under four stars: Wrap up 2022 with Marlon Williams and The Beths

Marlon Williams

Marlon Williams, 2022

Increasingly present on film and television as an actor, Marlon Williams comes back with studio album number three, and warns us not to take him too seriously. The uber-earnest country crooner has been displaced – much of the time – by a slinky chameleon. Displaying fluidity in genre, masculinity, and gender affinity, this is his most playful record. Motives and intents are a solid guess at best. He openly admires ex-partner Aldous Harding’s densely opaque musicality and lyricism. And where 2018’s Make Way For Love was a straight up, break-up album, My Boy is lots of things all at once, sometimes in each song.

Without his usual band and with electronic instruments for the first time, Williams wields a freer hand. And when it comes off, it really comes off. “Princes Walk” sounds weirdly like a John Lennon song, but Williamssounds much more like Brian Wilson, and the effect is gorgeous. “Don’t Go Back” is part two to his prior hit “Party Boy”, from an older and wiser perspective.

It is both the cleanest link back to his prior album, but also a subtly time-shifting wormhole back to the early 1980s. While there, the beautifully Bryan Ferry echoing “Thinking of Nina” manages to examine the flinty perseverance of unwanted male gaze, while also highlighting the retrospectively apparent creepiness of the lyrics and music videos of that era. Nice play, Marlon. “Soft Boys make The Grade” is another classic, skewering toxic masculinity with his trademark Roy Orbison vocal gentility. “Promises” is his Bee Gees-influenced love song and will delight his older fans.

GET THIS: A nice shift into versatility, opening many doors

The Beths

Ivy League Records, 2022

Still the best big little indie band that you might be lucky enough to see in provincial New Zealand are much-admired The Beths. The core of the band having met studying jazz at the University of Auckland, reassures us they know what they’re doing with their instruments and song structures. But it does also raise a challenge. We’ve loved 2018’s Future Me Hates Me and 2020’s Jump Rope Gazers – as has most of the rest of the music-loving world. What’s new in 2022? Sonically, not a huge amount.

Liz Stokes’ defiantly Kiwi-accented pop vocal and sensibilities are very much intact and as strong as ever.

The rest of the band all continue to perform faultlessly and match their playing with full-band harmony vocals, a real musical superpower in itself. Lyrically, this latest album is a little more playful and curious than its predecessors. And Stokes herself plays with a few more moods and states of tension than perhaps the prior albums “turn everything up to 11 and race to the finish” ethos. Saying that, “Silence is Golden” turns the volume up to 11 and does race to the finish – and sounds great getting there. “Your Side” shows a more tender side and is a more forward-facing song of love and yearning. Nice. “2am” is a beauty, a long unwinder with just the hint of experimentation that they must surely now be capable of splaying out.

And it does feel churlish to complain about a relentless cascade of high-quality indie-pop confection, but I do think a little more dramatic contrast might be needed next time up.

GET THIS: Sonic goodness locally accented

David Doig is a Havelock North specialist GP.