- Listening to Jen Cloher’s new album, In Blood Memory, it would appear that the four years Cloher has spent away from the studio have taken her in a seriously different direction. Or maybe it's not her per-se: “musicians don’t change that much, not after all this time” a gnarly, old industry friend of mine said. This was closely followed by the question “who’s in her band?” Oh, the slurringly tuneful Courtney Barnett. Goodbye ever-so-slightly twee folk rock troubadour and hello gnarly, dusty, rock chick, a-la Patti Smith. It’s not just the guitar work though, Cloher’s voice sounds more tired and leathery, slipping and sliding wearily across each song and it’s an affectation that really works.

Jen Cloher has every right to be acting a bit blasted, it’s only been a year and a half since she lost both her parents: her mother to Alzheimer's and her father to Parkinson’s. However, having shared the suffering through these long, wasting diseases and already having penned a great deal of music on the topic, Jen looked at a whole other album’s worth she had lined up, and threw it all away.

Instead she decided to focus on what was ‘alive’ inside her. It’s slightly odd then that Blood Memory’s epic centerpiece, Name In Lights is a song about failing in love and being cast out; its soaring refrain: There’s nothing I can do / So I let go of you. The song is a brutal self-analysis featuring such quips as: I pretend I’m younger / Even though we both know or I drink myself sober / I’m just no fun for you and I looked into the deep abyss / But all I saw was Narcissus. Barnett might be responsible for the greatness of the guitar work, but the lyrics represent some pretty damn fine penmanship. For all their anguish, they are both clear-eyed and witty and in the self-destructive fugue and atomic disintegration of the finish, there is a cleansing release that is completed in the following song Kamikaze Origami, which begins with a quiet, blasted feeling, like survivors walking away from some hideous disaster. It morphs slowly but surely, into an unlikely love song, floating on sweet pedal-steel.

The rest of the album plays on a theme of slightly messed up love, dragged down by dirty rock and uplifted by sweet country licks. It’s never quite as amazing as Name In Lights, but it doesn’t really need to be; hell, I could just about give Jen Cloher a free pass for the whole album, after that one. We even get a happy ending, of sorts, in closer Hold My Hand, though given some of the preceding degradation I don’t know how likely it is to last.

It really doesn’t matter, In Blood Memory illustrates admirably that life is mostly hideous wreckage and only occasionally are there moments that work. Cloher has found captured some of those, and boy do they work.

- Chris Cobcroft.