Album Review: Dancing and Screaming Around the Fire with Hozier

Hozier’s long-awaited sophomore album Wasteland, Baby! tackles the end of the world with humor, despair, love, and hope.

Written by Haley Kennis
Photo courtesy of Rubyworks Records

 
 

After not releasing new music for almost five years, fans and critics alike wondered what Irish singer-songwriter Hozier’s sophomore album would sound like. His self-titled debut album skyrocketed the artist into surprising fame almost instantly in late 2014, setting the bar for his future projects incredibly high. On September 6, 2018, he finally released new songs on the EP Nina Cried Power and gave the public a taste of what was to come. The songs “Moment’s Silence (Common Tongue)” and “NFWMB” mirrored his debut album very closely, while “Nina Cried Power (ft. Mavis Staples)” and “Shrike” suggested a completely different direction. So, where does Wasteland Baby! go?

Wasteland Baby! definitely echoes Hozier’s debut album with some of the same smokey blues that we know and love, but it also transforms that sound into an electrifying mixture of blues, soul, folk, and rock that is uniquely his own. The production is more polished than the homegrown sound of his first album, but it doesn’t distract from the lyricism that initially made Hozier so fresh and exciting. Instead, Hozier’s musical talent is highlighted by the backing gospel choirs and string sections that appear across the album. Though the album deals with a heavy concept –– it’s the end of the world after all –– the music and lyrics aren’t all doom and gloom. In a behind-the-scenes interview about the making of the album cover, Hozier stated that the album “kind of just looks at the great, you know, just the bonfire of our times. And some songs kind of dance around the fire and have a bit of fun, and some songs scream into it, and some are in the center of it.” Wasteland Baby! captures the baffling feeling of watching the world end and trying to enjoy the doomed ride.

 
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The varying moods throughout the album show the different ways people handle the end times. Upbeat songs like “Almost (Sweet Music)” and “To Noise Making (Sing)” are easy to dance and sing along to. The brooding and darkly powerful melodies that Hozier is best known for sizzle and slither their way into your mind on songs like “Be” and “Nina Cried Power.” Emotive acoustic folks songs like “Shrike” and “Would That I” balance out the heavier tracks. Finally, slow-burning songs “Movement,” “Talk,” and “As It Was” are particularly stirring and complete the entire package of the album. Each different musical style in this album comes together to form the ruined world Wasteland, Baby! is set in.

The apocalyptic theme is consistent across the whole album but songs such as “No Plan” and “Be” dive deeper into the idea. The dark and heavy standout track “No Plan” describes two people blindly making their way through the unraveling society. Hozier sings how in this world “There’s no plan, there’s no hand on the reign,” so what is the point of worrying too much about their relationship? “Be” is a brooding stomper poetically describing how the planet, politics, and even salvation are collapsing as a result of humanity’s constant mistakes. However hopeless things may be, Hozier “will grow bold in a battered and desolate land” as long as he has his love beside him.

Perhaps surprisingly, the album’s lyrical content goes beyond doomsday. The opening tracks “Nina Cried Power” and “Almost (Sweet Music)” pay tribute to music’s most important figures. “Nina Cried Power” is a blazing and soulful dedication to the greatest protest musicians of the past century: Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Patti Smith, James Brown, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and Mavis Staples (who gives a striking performance on the song). “Almost (Sweet Music)” acts as both a tribute to classic jazz and a tale of a person’s inability to move on. Direct references to classical jazz musicians like Chet Baker, John Coltrane, and Billie Holiday delicately weave their way throughout the lyrics. These songs are playful, but empowering, and show the vital importance of music –– especially during our troubled times.

But at the album’s core, Hozier muses on on love and relationships in the wasteland. “To Noise Making (Sing)” is a beautiful song encouraging you to sing your heart out no matter what. “Dinner & Diatribes” humorously describes a couple trapped in a “stuck-up” club and both can’t stop thinking about leaving to stir up a little mischief together. In “Shrike,” named after a bird known for impaling its prey on thorns, Hozier sorrowfully reflects on mistakes from a past relationship and hopes in another life they will both be reborn mutually dependent, like “a shrike to your sharp and glorious thorn.” The light and carefree love songs dance around the bonfire with almost no care in the world, while the tragic songs stand within the blaze.

The closing title-track, “Wasteland, Baby!,” is both delicate and haunting, comparing falling in love to the apocalypse itself: “all the fear and the fire of the end of the world / happens each time a boy falls in love with a girl.” But the song also acts as a love song to the apocalypse, celebrating the absurdity of it all (“wasteland, baby / I’m in love, I’m in love with you”). The water levels are rising, the sun is dying, and they face “the death of all things that are seen and unseen.” But this is “not an end, but the start of all things that are left to do.” The sun may die, the earth may shake, and the cities may be ruined, but the one he loves is “unbreaking.” Even when the earth is beyond recognition, their love will remain.

Wasteland, Baby! cements Hozier’s place in alternative music bybrilliantly celebrating and damning the mess of humanity. Even in the most hopeless moments we still have one another, and, if we show each other love, maybe we too can fall in love with the wasteland.

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