by Mia Hughes
Coming of age is a funny thing. It’s a time when giddy joy is inextricable from acute growing pain, and there’s a tinge of pathos in even the most mundane moments. And most strangely, when time passes, it sheds a golden tint on all of it, so that even the most painful moments become nostalgic.
Failures, Katie Malco’s debut LP, is a row of Polaroids on a wall. They’re of you, and people that you love, or once did. And though you’re smiling in the pictures, when you look at them now, you can’t help but feel everything that was hurting you at that moment.
The ten tracks document the past – Malco’s coming of age years – in a way that’s desperately present; she sorts through memories that are only snapshots now, and pictures them as moving scenes, as if to notice something that passed her by the first time. From slow, unembellished ballads to amped-up alt rock, Malco’s songwriting elevates the emotion masterfully with every turn of a melody or build in instrumentation – a masterclass in giving each song exactly what it needs.
The overriding feeling on Failures is that of pain. There’s the heartbreaking Fractures about trying to change oneself to fit into an unhappy relationship: ‘I’ll be this for you if you want me to / And I’ll love you endlessly / If you can pretend to love me’. Night Avenger is a relationship slipping even more through the cracks: ‘I’m freezing / But you won’t hold me’. And Peckham is a devastatingly lonely track about drowning sorrows with alcohol: ‘There’s empty bottles all over the floor / From when I felt alone the night before’.
But joy is present too, even while soaked in sadness. TW is about losing a loved one, but it’s about life more than it is death: ‘We’ll celebrate your life / And I’ll celebrate mine while I’m still alive’, Malco sings, amidst reminiscence about the car games she played on the journey to the funeral. And on Brooklyn she tells the story of visiting someone she cares about in New York, where they live now, the little happy memories, the laughter and the dancing, build up to an immensely poignant yearning, and a sadness that those moments only existed for a second in time. ‘I see you fading and I live across an ocean,’ she sings in the incredibly moving moment that the band kicks in, and she ends the song with the line: ‘You say I can’t let things lie / I know you’re right, you’re right’.
Perhaps Failures doesn’t let things lie, but there’s value in that. The past versions of ourselves are never as far away as we think, and there are lessons to be learned from them if we allow it. Failures embraces them all, feels their pain, and promises to remember them.
Secret Meeting score: 80
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