Sour Widows – Revival of a Friend

Alternative Rock

88%

 

There’s a vast canon of “break-up albums” that spans decades and transcends genre boundaries. We see them time and again listed amongst the most beloved and acclaimed albums ever recorded, and fresh heartbreaks will ensure that dozens more will be released every single year. On the one hand you have artists trying to process all of the pain and confusion and emptiness that they’re feeling, channelling it into their music as a form of catharsis. On the other you have an audience, possibly going through a break-up of their own, hearing their own anguish reflected in the record; finding all the thoughts and feelings raging inside that they may struggle to define, or even acknowledge, being put into words in right in front of them. The result is the kind of perfect storm that sums up the power of music, both as a means of expression and as a way to connect people.

Thing is, break-ups are far from the only facet of the human experience that can elicit this kind of feeling, yet albums about them have far and away the biggest cultural footprint. There are other outpourings of emotion out there every bit as poignant and arresting. Other moments in our lives where we long to hear a song that makes us think “Someone else gets it, at least I’m not going through this alone“. Other perfect storms of expression and connection that are able to take an emotion, an experience, and break it down to its most raw primordial form, like the pain is some fundamental force of nature. 

Revival of a Friend is an album about grief. What’s more, this incredible debut is one of the most enlightened and thought provoking explorations of grief I’ve heard. It sees not only two songwriters, but two longtime friends, each leaning on each other as a way to deal with their respective loss. Susanna Thompson losing her mother to a battle with cancer, while Maia Sinaiko lost their partner to an accidental overdose – two shades of loss, the slow and the sudden. You hear that storm of expression and connection all at once; being able to pour your heart out onto a page knowing the person sat across from you understands every ounce of the pain you’re feeling. You can feel the intimacy, tenderness and patience that went into making this record, and what it stands as a testament to, which makes Revival feel all the more haunting and impactful. 

The album’s command of light and dark reminds me a lot of the alt rock side of Julien Baker, how you can still hear the rawness and fragility of her vocals even as the instrumentation rages around her. Here the brooding arrangements and bright vocal harmonies juxtapose each other beautifully, as the band flit between bursts of alt rock rage, atmospheric passages of emptiness, and gorgeous moments of wistful remembrance. This is an album made to be experienced as a whole. Grief isn’t something you can just parcel up on a whim after all, rather you have to sit it out until you get to the other side.

That said, the record still has some heart wrenching highlights. ‘I-90’ captures how it’s often the little moments, like some late night drive, which end up being the vignettes we remember most vividly when someone passes. The dreamy doldrums of ‘Gold Thread’ seems to stretch on for an age (yet never outstays its welcome) to denote how far the titular ties that bind us, and those we choose to love, truly extend. While ‘Cherish’, and its Tool-esque lead riff, describes how all the outbursts of rage that the grief chooses to manifest as are beneath the surface a plea for love and compassion (“There is no fix, I’m just tender like this, I watch you take me in, Will you love me through this? ‘Cause I wanna be cherished by you“). 

It would be so easy for this to be an album of nothing but anger, and pain, and emptiness. Lost and alone. What Revival does is pair all that with beauty. The people we lose are never truly gone so long as we carry their memory with us. Moments trapped in amber, perfectly preserved. How terrifying it is, the prospect of never making more memories together. How beautiful it is, to have a piece of them live within you, a vivid snapshot unmarred by time. Both are true, both are equally a part of grief. Much as those we lose are preserved in memory, all of Sour Widows’ grief, the terrifying and the beautiful, all of their resilience and the revelations born from it – it’s all imprinted into every note of Revival of a Friend, for anyone who needs it.