Martha Wainwright has forged her musical career with outspoken and urbane folk rock that revels in both the unsaid and the uncomfortable. The Canadian-American singer-songwriter’s most popular songs to date have tracked the long-term effects of a tumultuous childhood in a family of musical luminaries, including a biting critique of her famous father’s self-absorption. Wainwright’s music is as blunt and revealing as it is skillfully performed, and though she’s toned down the bawdiness of her lyricism on her fifth album, Love Will Be Reborn, her voice is as captivating as ever.
Wainwright contemplates her musicianship on “Middle of the Lake,” an ominous meta-song that, like many of the best album openers, declares Love Will Be Reborn’s raison d’être. While Wainwright’s assertion that music-making helps her feel less alone, less mortal, and less afraid is somewhat of a tired sentiment, her conscious deployment of every tool in her technical kit gives the song its heft. In one moment, her voice is a thin gasp, in the next it’s a soaring, brazen belt, and it’s always nothing short of mesmerizing.
Love Will Be Reborn is rootsier than Wainwright’s past work, and its acoustic instrumentation is a perfect complement to her piercing voice. Each crackling belt and swooping wail on the country-rock-inflected “Getting Older” renders her pleading lyrics about loneliness and separation all the more convincing. Whether on the mournful “Report Card” or the upbeat “Hole in My Heart,” Wainwright’s perspective is less acerbic than in was on 2008’s I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too, which arguably dulls her edges but not her charm.
In line with Love Will Be Reborn’s organic folk sound, the lyrics here often revolve around nature. On the title track, seasons change, bringing birds, full moons, and newborn babies. The vivid “Body and Soul” fittingly centers the body, zooming in on clasped hands and locked lips. The track allows us a rare insight into the tumultuous life experiences that purportedly inspired the album, touchingly redirecting our attention from Wainwright’s lost love to the children she wants to protect from her heartbreak.
Though rare, the album’s deviations from its acoustic sound and earnest introspection can be distracting. The spacey synths that open “Hole in My Heart” seem to signal a stylistic turn until they, thankfully, fade into the background. Similarly celestial sounds reappear on “Rainbow,” whose equally peculiar lyrics (“Stop playing me like Play-Doh/Why don’t you move back to Mars?/Take a car/It’s been paid for”) land mostly because Wainwright performs them with such conviction. Elsewhere, “Justice” obliquely comments on the gender politics of the five-year period since Wainwright’s last album, but lyrics such as “Justice, where are you?” make it unclear whether she’s looking for change socially or personally.
Ultimately, Wainwright’s boldest expressive choices are vocal rather than thematic. Her delivery ranges from wild and throaty on “Sometimes,” to soulful on “Being Right,” to plaintive on the haunting closing track “Falaise de Malaise.” Even at her most unrestrained, as on the soulful “Being Right,” her technique is remarkable, and she renders each lyric with passion. As promised in the opening track, Wainwright’s “songs of love and pain” connect deeply, thanks largely to her fearlessness of her vocal performances.
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