Album Review: The Thread by WILLOW
WILLOW wrote The Thread for a mother goddess whose fury counts as a blessing. The strongest faith in it goes to whiskey with a lover's mother and a love that won’t cage anybody.
The collaboration started with COPINGMECHANISM in 2022 and lasted until 2024’s Empathogen, nominated for a Grammy. The third project with Chris Greatti sees WILLOW choosing the oldest topic that she possibly could. “The Divine Mother archetype is present in almost every culture on Earth from ancient times on, as far as we know,” she explained regarding “She’s My Religion” this summer. “And this song is for her.”
It’s the her who wears constellations with each star “a quiet warning,” and the warning is crystal clear: “Nature always wins.” Here, fury is a blessing, and the goddess tears the singer open to purify her, showering her with the grace that comes rushing down like a torrential river towards the sea, and WILLOW does not need a raft to reach it, the voice already inside of her. She embraces the wound as her gift and asks to be torn apart more: “Break me open/So I can keep expanding,” a more demanding thing than any of the admiration that follows.
It’s the family that she’s asking for on “Unconditional”, drinking whiskey with her lover’s mother, crying her feelings out to her sister, keeping the love “in the in-between” where nobody gets imprisoned. She doesn’t mind if the person needs someone else to fill his/her loneliness with; she’ll love him/her even from that quiet place where the polarity meets. WILLOW’s courting takes a much wider scope on “Crush On Eternity,” as she holds hands with time and space, “You steal my mind/Bend me like light,” and the best line on it appears in the verse that she shares with Mei Semones: “I’ve kissed desire and called it grace,” confession and pick-up line at once.
Someone gets the truth straight away on “Shrink to Fantasy”, no pretenses or games, just the shape of her heart, but still refuses to be her friend. Her response does not include any supplication in it: “I am not a fantasy/For filler, not a, not a trophy hanging on your wall.” She is happy to let the person have his/her own wings; she’ll never trim them and will never shrink to suit anyone’s daydreams. She reflects the honesty on herself on “Tall Baby”: “I’m just a child/Trying to be a woman/Learning to hold this spirit,” searching for something “sweet to keep ‘em quiet” when the emotions overwhelm her, ending up with thinking less as the only cure she knows to the groundlessness.
Her most vivid imagery grows out of the rot, the holes on “Bone Collector” that seem “like a temple or something died,” the silk that she spins every night and day to transmute the rot, the lust that she watches transforming into jewelry and then into poetry. Detritivore with diamond teeth, as old as the land, she blossoms under the waning glow of whatever the other person had to give up on. She’ll preserve it and will wear it as a necklace on her chest.
She loses the grip on “The Present Moment,” yelling about the destruction right in front of her eyes, stressing that there’s no time to take anything lightly, then exchanging those stakes for hearts in the water fountain and compassion administered “strike to the artery,” images too loose to contain the alarm she raised a moment ago. “The Thread” sounds even more vague, a bitter pill swallowed, no point in moping any longer, steps that somehow can’t follow her, “Blinded by fact and it’s so hard to see,” need directed at a you whom she never sees a face or a name of.
All of the demands that WILLOW makes on “Talk On the Hill” are injunctions, gathering on the hillside where the wind knows all of our names, sitting silently to learn from her how, acquiring a new melody from the smoke signals that she sends across the earth and that she cannot decipher yet. She wants to make the teacher proud and knows that he/she would be proud of her too. The tuition gets more expensive on “Hell to Pay,” where she’s sure that in case the fault is found it must be hers, “Such a waste of freedom”, and she drops all of her plans and applies for another job, being your hands, because she cannot move mountains like you. Then she declares the place she is stuck at: “To see the path so clearly, lost within the trees.” Plans are already abandoned, so the hands are all that she has left, offering them to someone capable of moving the mountains that she cannot.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Shrink to Fantasy,” “Tall Baby,” “Bone Collector”