Indigo Sparke – Hysteria
October 7th 2022 marked a new chapter in the musical journey undertaken by Sydney born singer-songwriter Indigo Sparke with her second full length effort entitled ‘Hysteria’. Work on the album started in the bowels of lockdown, where Sparke was stranded in Australia coming to terms with the world collapsing. ‘Hysteria’ appears to very much be an album born out of struggle and heartache, themes that are so beautifully contended throughout the length of the album.
The album opener, ‘Blue’, sets the scene beautifully – “Standing alone, with a bottle of wine, you come back to me”. The grief and sorrow in this song gifts itself beautifully into this heart wrenching performance. The song is primarily driven by a droning, simple guitar track; despite its simple nature, the atmosphere it creates is tense, powerful and hints at a strong passion from Sparke before the track soon fades out.
The titular track, ‘Hysteria’, shortly follows where a strong Joni Mitchell esq folk influence can be heard. The melodies on this track are beautiful, there is simply nothing much more to add. After two tracks you can already tell how promising this record is turning out to be. This beauty is standardised, with the bar set high, with the following track ‘Pressure in my Chest’, contending with the roller coaster journey through life with love.
‘God is a Woman’s Name’ is where the album is really turned up a notch with its addition of pummelling drums. The use of percussion on this track exemplifies the emotion involved and makes for an authentic listening experience as Indigo’s lyrics really sell you her point of view.
The middle section of the album, where some records do occasionally slip into a droning bore, is one of the most interesting aspects of this album with tracks ‘Why Do You Lie?’, ‘Infinity Honey’ and (my favourite track from this album) ‘Golden Ribbons’. Perhaps, again, what makes this section of the album so unique is the exceptional use of percussion. It would have been an easy decision to try and keep this record as low-fi and stripped back as possible, yet Sparke deployed the creative input of Walkmen drummer, Matt Barrick.
Following this powerful section arrives a much slower collection of musicality with such tracks like ‘Real’ and ‘Sad is Love’, where the stripped back nature does truly come back into play and works absolute wonders.
The final three tracks leave a true lasting impression on the listener, you can trust my judgement on this as I’ve listened to this record many, many times in the recent days. Perhaps my only slight objection to the album would be that ‘Hold On’ may be a stronger album closer – but that’s just my critical and personal creative opinion. Despite this, the greatness of ‘Burn’ should not be ignored as it is just as impression-leaving and beautiful. One of the most emphatic things that this album leaves you with is one of the final lyrics uttered: “Just tell me its okay,” before Sparke’s beautiful voice guides the listener out of the airwaves and back into reality. These lyrics almost create a circular, lexical field of grief and relationships when you account for some of the opening lines of ‘Blue’, the album’s opener.
Hysteria is out now via Sacred Bones Records.
Alex Malpass
