By Will McGuirk
We have heard the voice of angels, clear as ice crystals but the voice of a fallen angel, yearning, straining, struggling against the weight of those heavy wings stained with dust is one we listen for too little.
The earthy spirituals of Oz-based Angie McMahon on the EP ’Piano Salt’ are the paeans of a grounded being more used to soaring above the cathedrals of forest, sky bound, than stranded here with dirt drawn blues - one can only imagine the intensity of thought and action poured into this collection of songs; her own reachings, as well as folding in Bruce Springsteen’s “The River’, itself an ode to escape, to flight, to freedom, with Lana Del Rey’s “Born To Die,” - a curious but lovely antithesis to the Boss’s roaring optimism.
Each song in this short gathering is a rung in a Jacob’s Ladder for a slow ascent to the Great Easing. This EP of McMahon’s, a revisiting of her 2019 album “Salt’, is a break in the heaviness laying over the globe at present, and it is one step closer to the lightness on the other side.
