Imagine a world where Brian Fallon gave up on trying to be Springsteen and instead filled his head with Van Morrison and the National. The album he’d produce in these circumstances would be ‘The Weakness’. It’s intensely personal and the pain he shares is the kind of pain we’ve all felt and couldn’t find the right words to express.
Following a very public mid-pandemic divorce from country singer-songwriter Kacey Musgraves, Ruston Kelly left the bright lights of Nashville and isolated himself in a cottage in the middle of nowhere. After months of no human contact, he emerged with ‘The Weakness’, a mix of talking yourself down, talking yourself out of it and talking yourself through it. “The overall narrative of the record is that there’s a variety of weaknesses that I need to deal with, and a variety of strengths that I need to bolster,” said Kelly, and ‘The Weakness’ has proved to be catharsis on an epic scale.
Title track and first single drop ‘The Weakness’ is a song destined to be performed in a festival field lit with fairy lights, and plugging it into your headphones makes you feel like you’re in a black and white music video. “I started working on that song and the refrain just kept coming to me – ‘We don’t give in to the weakness,’” Kelly revealed, and that sheer effort into wanting to lose control and self destruct but managing to keep it together is what powers this track along, with ethereal laser guitar shooting in to the night sky. There’s minimal instrumental packaging aside from isolated strumming at the start and it’s all about haunting, hopeless crystalline vocals.
The best songs on the album are the most stripped-back. The dreamlike, Nick Cave wannabe ‘Let Only Love Remain’ is very simple and Kelly takes the space to let his hurt do the talking. Similarly, ‘Dive’s base of a repeating xylophone sample under Bon Iver drifting balladry makes it the perfect modern heartbreak song. The bare funereal ‘Cold Black Mile’ is pure Fallon at his most bleak and it is stunning in it’s blistering, frozen, almost A Capella passion.
It’s the lyrical puzzles of ‘Michael Keaton’ that make it the most fascinating track; “It’s 3:35 in the morning / and I thought CBD would not get me high but here I am / thinking what if Michael Keaton killed himself in ‘Multiplicity’? / Would that be genocide?” At one point in the song he rants at a friend for still crying over a girl, and the ‘friend’ may well be Kelly himself, growing sick of his own pain and separating out his emotional side (“If I have to listen to you talk about her one more time / I swear to God / I will set this house on fire!”). If Kelly embraces his potential for quirky lyrics, capturing a specific setting through streams of consciousness and accepting that he has the kind of voice that needs to drift through the air like incense, he will go down in history as one of the greats. But the question remains; what kind of record could he have produced if he’d have got angry? There’s hints of nihilism and rage in ‘Holy Shit’ with it’s refrain of “Oh my God, I just wanna give up…” and we’re left with a sense that if only he’d embraced his inner Hulk he’d have an incredible folk punk album in him. Instead, the acceptance of his hurt via vintage twisted smoky effects such as on the autobiographical ‘Mending Song’ has sent him into the soporific embrace of ‘grown up indie’.
It’s a beautiful album for the recently dumped, and there’s enough of a spark shining out of the darkness to hope that if Ruston Kelly smashes a few guitars, he’ll let out his inner howl and we’ll find out what he’s really made of.
KATE ALLVEY
