Nobody ponders loss quite like Peter Milton Walsh. For forty years, he and his chamber pop band the Apartments have composed beautiful sad songs that make it feel so good to hurt so bad. Whether the Oz native is drawing on his real world hurt, or writing portraits of people he’s observed or simply invented, he brings a poet’s heart, a journalist’s eye, and a plain-spoken means of delivery to the pain of missing someone in ways that wrench your heart while putting a sad smile on your face.
It’s a difficult balancing act to pull off, but Walsh does it brilliantly on the Apartments’ tenth album That’s What the Music is For. “Things we love vanish from our eyes,” he sings in the quietly melodic “Another Sun Gone Down.” “Memory and colours dissolve like letters in the sky.” It’s the kind of lyric that makes you nod in wistful insight, drawing you to the song’s side right as it ramps up into a trumpet-laced flourish. The jangling “A Handful of Tomorrow” pairs an uplifting tune (well, nearly) to support self-lacerations like “And on the days you filled with sun/I’d count the ways we’d come undone,” concluding “You can’t save me from myself.” Walsh puts it even more baldly in the relationship elegy “You Know We’re Not Supposed to Feel This Way,” singing “I just don’t understand/I thought we had time/When did you run out of years” before asking plainly, “Are you there in the songs I’ll leave behind?” The pain is frank, but the songs go down like cream – cream laced with arsenic, perhaps, but cream nonetheless.
Even the wry “Death Would Be My Best Career Move” and the unusually political (and bitter) “The American Resistance” unfold while suffused with distress, carrying an emotional heft beyond what we’d expect from the titles. What we consider once or twice in a lifetime events become the bread and butter of the Apartments’ musical soul, and that’s fine with us. “Bring back the days that had you in them,” Walsh croons guilelessly in the title track. “That’s what the music is for.” Nostalgia, yearning, understanding, catharsis – all in two clean and elegant lines. Nobody ponders loss like Peter Milton Walsh, and thank the gods for that.
