Half Waif : See You At the Maypole

Half Waif See You at the Maypole review

There is a question every writer must contend with: What amounts to a life? Across years, if one is lucky, you experience so much sorrow and conflicted joy, traumas that breach like waves over the walls of our hearts and let in tender rays of grace like sunlight. The easy shapes of youth contort and dissolve, bend irretrievably into stranger things, marking the complexity of maturity. It’s a trial of the spirit to attain that kind of perspective. Fred Hampton, rest in peace, great communist American thinker and fomenting core of the Black Panthers, once said experience does not equal consciousness. It is so strange in retrospect what shakes the fruit loose to drop in our laps, to see the sweetness even of bitter things and vice versa too.

Since Lavender, the rightly acclaimed breakthrough record of Half Waif, Nandi Rose has been delivering diminishing returns. This is not strictly her fault: the music still resonated in a beautiful place, half Tori Amos and half Bruce Hornsby with a dash of Laurie Anderson to taste, amounting to something on the more sincerely artful and literary end of adult contemporary pop with slight avant-garde edge. However, on the lyrical end, while she was delving deeper in ways to the generative core of her being, there was a distinct lack of life experiences to draw from and complicate those stories and thoughts to the same deeply satisfying degree of that third record of hers. Make no mistake: the two that followed Lavender (The Caretaker and Mythopoetics) are both good records. We didn’t praise the latter flippantly when it was released. But even that album felt more an aesthetic extension of that previous record rather than truly new transformative ground.

See You at the Maypole, a symbol of fertility and renewal, comes after she experienced with her husband a late-term miscarriage and the current U.S. paradigm that has half-criminalized the necessary medications uterine people need to carry out either at-home abortions or the, to be shamefully blunt, clearing of a miscarried body. These are deep and complicating traumas. There was, I recall, a strained look on my mother’s face when she told me and my brother that she’d had two miscarriages, late enough that the children had names. This stuck in her mind decades later. As makes sense: these are unique losses, not the death of a child but the denial of a child at the cusp, like watching a tree wither in frost and die before the flowers on its branches can bud, let alone fruit.

While even from a distance I and anyone decent mourns this great loss for Rose and her husband, it has proven the transformative event that has fully rejuvenated not just her music but also the keenness of her pen. These songs are wistful as much as melancholy, carry the stately and confounded, conflicted mixture of humble appreciation and the lingering ghosts of lives that could have been. There is a sense of the tensions of maturity here that only those who are themselves mature might appreciate, people who have not just endured hard things but have perhaps done hard things, are as guilty as they are aggrieved, and carry the unwinding thread of hope through both of those places. Musically, there is a windswept grandeur here, comparable to Bat for Lashes’ own maternity record The Dream of Delphi but inverted. Tori Amos lingers here still, but instead now her later work, the most musically accomplished, as informed by contemporary classical and chamber composition as keen-eared pop. Electronics, while present, now share space with guitars, with orchestrations, creating the same rich and progressive instrumental bedding that marked both Tears for Fears and XTC’s own late-period musical development.

Some records are crafted by sound alone, striking you with beauty and the sublime even if unaware of their generations. Other albums are driven more by narrative, perhaps unimpressive musically until you learn a fact or two, half-myths, and find the experience slices you now to the bone in your horrible gnosis. This record is both. These two halves deepen each other, intensifying the other in a wheel. I suspect this record will prove as central to her next phase of work as Lavender before it, and it’s a rare pleasure to witness the moment of transformation of a superb writer.


Label: Anti-

Year: 2024


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Half Waif See You at the Maypole review

Half Waif : See You at the Maypole

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