#talitres

In a recent interview, Walsh — who’s been recording as The Apartments since 1979 —  described the character in “Paint The Days White” as trying to draw someone out of a darkness that’s descended on their life. This theme of beneficence towards those “at the bottom of nowhere” unites the nine songs that comprise A Life Full of Farewells, the band’s recently reissued third album. On it, Walsh’s narrator poses a lot of questions and makes a lot of statements based on experience. “I knew the same taste and the fear for a while,” “That hole in your life, who'll fix it? / That hope that you had, what killed it?” he sings, for example, on “Not Every Clown Can Be In The Circus” drawing out his vowels like an earnest Dan Bejar. By alternating between the first-person past and second-person present tenses like this, Walsh’s words work to build trust with and speak rhetorically to those currently in the muck.       

A Life Full of Farewells kicked off The Apartments’ most prolific period, from 1995 to 1997, when they released three albums in quick succession. Over the decade and a half leading up to this point, the band had taken several breaks, including a stretch when they were prevented from releasing new material, the result of a lawsuit related to their song’s inclusion on the soundtrack to John Hughes’ Some Kind of Wonderful. These gaps in activity contributed to The Apartments’ little-known status at the time of A Life Full of Farewells’ release, even in their native Australia. In comparison, The Go-Betweens — who Walsh was an early member of — had released a half dozen critically acclaimed albums and developed a cult following in the same amount of time. A Life Full of Farewells’ opening track, “Things You Keep,” finds the narrator taking stock of their life wondering “What if your best days are done? ” and contemplating the grim changes that greet people closing out their third decade: “Said goodbye to your baby face / then just about everything.”  Jeff Crawley’s trumpet lines, leading the way out of the chorus and into the verses, lend the song a stately air that counterbalances its nostalgic and regretful tone. 

As weighty as A Life Full of Farewells’ subject matter is, though, it’s one of the smoother Apartments records to drink down. The trumpet’s presence on half of the tracks scattered throughout the record gives it a brisk and urbane feel which offsets the slower tracks. “You Became My Big Excuse,” with its twangy instrumentation and poison drunk resignation, is one of the album’s musical detours. In the absence of the brass and string arrangements, Walsh’s hushed voice is left to find its way through the twilight alone over a bed of brushed drums. “If you land in darkness, no one can keep up,” he sings as a cresting wave of pedal steel crashes over the final words of the verse: “nobody could.” 

The album’s other musical aberration is “She Sings To Forget You,” an inverted reimaging of rocker “The Goodbye Train” from the band’s previous album drift, which begins with the sound of a closing door. Leaving the room and pressing the record button, producer Paul McKercher captures Walsh sitting down to sing alongside piano player Chris Abrahams (The Necks) to help him get a better feel for the song. The story goes that when the rehearsal concluded and Walsh asked Abrahams whether he should sing it again, McKercher piped in from afar: “Why would you?” “She Sings To Forget You” is a magically intimate rendition that somehow manages to transform the clamor of the original into the sparest flicker of a torch song. And while it’s more Sondheim than Bacharach, Walsh gives a nod to the latter and furthers the feline motif in the album’s lyrics: “Kiss off the past, your dead illusions / Now tell me Pussycat, what's new? Tell me where your hopes went to.” In their darkly dressed way, it’s as if The Apartments, with A Life Full of Farewells, have crafted the aural equivalent of the inspirational poster with the kitten hanging from a branch — a document of the band at their most masterful. Hang in there, baby!