As the world burns, Julia Reidy is making music you can see
“Vanish,” a rich and ravishing new album by the Australian guitarist Julia Reidy, is filled with music that demands to be seen — and for some reason, my ears can’t stop seeing news footage of the historic wildfires that decimated more that 28 million acres of Australia over the past year. The word “Vanish” might be a prompt, as well as the title of Reidy’s 2016 album “All is Ablaze,” plus the fact that Reidy is from Sydney. Or maybe the brain subconsciously yearns for music to memorialize the global catastrophes that a cataclysmic, nonstop news cycle might otherwise blot out of our memory.
“Vanish” contains two sprawling compositions, each designed to fill one side of a vinyl disc, but Reidy’s music flares and surges with an intensity that suggests it doesn’t want to be contained at all. She uses grand melodies and carefully clashing timbres to build layers of drama, but the two tracks on this album — “Clairvoyant” and “Oh Boy” — maintain a rhythmic amorphousness, making space and time feel vague and loose.
Sonically, there are a few signposts. Reidy’s keyboards ooze like an ’80s sci-fi soundtrack. Her crudely Auto-Tuned vocalizations sound like primordial pop hooks. And when she foregrounds her guitar playing, it can sparkle like celestial folk song or growl like charred prog rock. Reidy has cited the influence of improvisational guitarist Bill Orcutt and the synthesizer soundscaping of Vangelis, and she might have a distant cousin in the worldly jazz of guitarist Steve Tibbetts, too. But altogether, this music sounds very much like itself.
Shouldn’t it look that way, too? Permanently assigning a set of images to these teeming sounds ultimately limits the experience, and Reidy’s music always seems to be pushing against its perimeters. That makes “Vanish” a highly evocative album worth revisiting. Once the fire-visions burn out, something beautiful will likely grow in their place.
