Wiri Donna — Being Alone

If you listen to Being Alone by Wiri Donna around other people, no one will talk. The clarity with which musician Bianca Bailey outlines the impact of violent separation, as a soft opener, will take up all the air in a room.

It has the effect of someone casually dropping into a conversation at a party that they hate it here, while everyone around them is out of it. In both the lyrics that rhyme without the appearance of any effort, and the way that she pronounces them, “so I place toothpaste/around my neck/an old wives tale to/get rid of bruises/that nobody uses.” That Courtney Barnett and Anthonie Tonnon trick of utilising a strong accent to create rhymes where they wouldn’t exist on the page, Bailey makes her untethered state seem like the most natural thing in the world.

Wiri Donna’s Being Alone EP is a concept album of sorts, one that tracks the experience of coming of age: from confusion to learning, and curiosity to pain, and the slow burn of increasing pressure on your neck as it comes in and out of focus.

It’s like the stages of grief, misunderstood as being for the people who remain rather than as intended to guide the one who is dying, perhaps ‘coming of age’ isn’t a linear process either, but more like getting stuck in a storm that is in a constant state of transition, between the burst and recession of shock and fury.

How long you stay stuck in the middle part depends on so many things, a flux state captured by Being Alone, and ultimately left unanswered.

Review by C. Billing.