Words by Chiara Strazzulla
It is hard to escape the feeling that rock and pop music, both in the mainstream and in many branches of the alternative scene, has felt in recent years an insuppressible urge to be constantly more: more complex, more baroque, more spectacular, more dissonant, more chaotic. From this sort of musical horror vacui a broad variety of results has been spawned, ranging from the beautiful to the nonsensical; some of which increasingly leave a lingering feeling that there may be, in truth, very little under the busy surface. To release a song that is, in a sense, almost distilled down to its core components is very much to buck the trend, and therefore an act of bravery. To pull it off with poise and confidence, and with great emotional honesty, and deliver something that is painfully beautiful as a result is a target that few would even dare aim for. One of the few is Misty Miller – who has long been on the radar of those in the know as one of the most charismatic vocalist and songwriters in the London scene – and her new single, Too Heavy, is precisely the successful result of such a gamble.
To define it as a ballad would be not to do Too Heavy justice. The track – which has already entranced those lucky enough to hear it live, and brought a poignant silence over otherwise boisterous audiences – is so much more than that. Ballad-like its chords and overall lilt might be, but the song feels much more like a confessional in music, a laying bare of something profoundly intimate and private. Its backbone comes from Miller’s intense vocals, which still have a distinctive softness even when, in the most visceral parts of the song, they feel like they are lingering at the very edges of a liberating roar. Miller has frequented both folk music and punk through her career, and parts of both have seeped into the construction of this song, which has the melancholy abandon of an old folk ballad and the sharp edges of a punk classic. The interplay between the vocals and the guitar – played in the studio by Miller’s brother Rufus – feels like a conversation throughout: the guitar line allows the vocals to flow, but is never too overbearing, never encroaching too far on the space that is required for this kind of powerful delivery to breathe as it needs to.
"The song feels much more like a confessional in music, a laying bare of something profoundly intimate and private"
If one were to condense Too Heavy in one word, that word would be raw. Raw in the sense of almost painful intensity, for sure; but also in the sense of a stark sincerity which in the world of music – an art form inevitably intertwined with performance, where emotions are amplified and almost everyone wears a mask, at least on stage – is very rarely found. There is an emotional truth in this track that is presented simply as is, without embellishment and without restraint; a vulnerability that shines through in all its many nuances, from the darkest ones to the most beautiful. Raw, also, in the intelligent way in which a stripped-down production lets the song express itself without ever becoming too intrusive, without superimposing excessive filters onto it, and resisting the temptation to excessively clean up a sound that – expressing, as it is, such visceral and brutally honest feelings - simply cannot have too many clean edges. There is a maturity, also, to this track that speaks to Miller’s years of experience not only as a songwriter and a live performer, but also as an active member of a community of artists, one that has proved time and again to be a fertile ground for the safe expression through music of even the most intimate of feelings. It is this maturity that makes it possible for an artist to know exactly to what extent to let go, to perform the leap of faith of letting that raw feeling take the wheel and drive a performance, in the knowledge that those who will listen will understand, will relate and feel seen.
Women, in particular, will find that some of the feelings bubbling to the surface of this song resonate deeply with them: the pressure, suffocating at times, of demanded nurture; the implied necessity of resilience at a time when one wishes only to explore vulnerability. But there is an even more universal layer to those feelings that will make it possible for virtually any listener to see themselves reflected in Too Heavy as in a merciless mirror. The experience is cathartic – as it is easy to imagine it must have been for Miller herself, and that intensity is reflected in her vocals – in a way that music perhaps should be more often, and is not often enough. It is a song that feels like it comes, in a sense, de profundis: from the bottom of the pit, but with strength and with hope. The feeling might be familiar to the lover of classic rock, who will have found it in the likes of David Bowie’s Rock’n’Roll Suicide, or in Marianne Faithfull’s take on Sister Morphine.
Too Heavy feels also like a song of maturity, both artistic and personal. It is the creation of an artist who is not scared of showing herself in all that she is, including those aspects that can feel like open wounds; and the creation of an artist who has a very accurate, confident gauge of what is just enough and what would be just a little too much. It is, at the same time, visceral and fine-tuned: an even more impressive feat in a track that works with so little and makes it work so well.
Perhaps, lost in the vagaries and eccentricities of the art of our times, we occasionally lose sight of the way in which art, and music in particular, can be used to produce truthful snapshots of the human condition. This song is one such, and it is in that snapshot that its beauty, fragile and forceful at the same time, resides.
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