Reviews
Artist:Mae Karthauser Album: Army Dreamers
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 1
Website: https://maekarthauser.co.uk
There's a refined, Edwardian quality to the piano intro on Mae Karthauser's new track, a cover of Kate Bush's 1980 anti-war anthem Army Dreamers. Like music you might hear drifting out of a parlour window in a well-heeled city neighbourhood.
That sophisticated, sublime style is elevated to an even loftier aesthetic plane when our heroine starts to sing. Clear as cut glass, Mae's voice soars like a nightingale over Bush's acrobatic melody, wafted heavenward on warm zephyrs of cello and flute.
Pretty as it all undeniably is, there's a bleak undercurrent at play here. It's dainty music, sure - but music that's dealing in downbeat themes. Army Dreamers a song about war. About death. About a mother's son, mown down by hostile gunfire. The cold brutality of conflict - a timely theme if ever there was one.
One's emotions are tugged all over the place. Exalted by grace, yet irreversibly driven mad by the relentless reiteration of the waltz. Mae and her trio - Ben Roberts and Ronja Schlumberger - play their parts with divine delicacy. But the central premise of the work - the unavoidable futility of violence, the howling madness of war - lends a melancholy gloss to the piece.
It's a timeless record, like grief is timeless. Lonely, in much the same way an unmarked grave is lonely. A thing of raw, haunting beauty.
A.H.
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