Kirsty MacColl
Titanic Days

THE REVIEW

Understanding "Titanic Days" is not as easy as it might seem. To fully appreciate it, to grasp all its subtle nuances, the feelings, the sensations contained within, one must contextualize it carefully: those already familiar with Kirsty certainly have an advantage. They know she has never had any reservations about using her music to express ideas and emotions, and throughout her career, she has never tied her name to a specific genre, effortlessly moving from rockabilly to country and through to pop rock, acoustic folk, Caribbean sounds, and much more.

From this perspective, "Titanic Days" is confirmed as an album in the purest Kirsty MacColl style, yet it sounds profoundly different from the rest of her production: less eclectic, less dreamy than the masterpiece "Electric Landlady" that preceded it. "Titanic Days" arrives at a crucial moment in Kirsty's life, where a fully realized artistic and authorial maturity coincides with a very difficult personal period. The end of her marriage with Steve Lillywhite has deep repercussions on the album, and like all traumas, it inevitably brings back other ghosts from the past, particularly the still recent death of her father Ewan. Demonstrating great character and inner strength, Kirsty chooses not only to vent but, above all, to react, to hold her spine straight and her head high, to look all her fragilities, her problems, and the people who have disappointed her in the eyes, and to muster the strength to take control of her life once more. "Titanic Days" is a perfect chronicle of that intense and difficult moment, a strikingly autobiographical and self-referential album, disillusioned, angry, even sarcastic at times, but where the "old" Kirsty still emerges, that simple, intelligent, ironic, and sensitive woman I've come to know and love in her previous releases. Given these premises, "Titanic Days" can only be her most intensely personal, poignant, and liberating album, candid and direct as always.

Perhaps it is just a personal observation influenced by my feelings, but in my opinion, "Titanic Days" is an album where it is very difficult not to identify, if not entirely, at least in some sections: the songs on the album speak of something true and simple, emotions and situations that practically everyone has encountered in their life, the need to have someone by your side, the regrets of a relationship gone wrong, the thrill of a fleeting adventure, the impulse to escape into one's dreams and the desire to start anew. Kirsty leaves nothing between the lines, she expresses herself without beating around the bush, from "You'll never stop running, it's like waiting for Christmas again, it's all lost in the blink of an eye" to "I've been an awful woman for all my life, a dreadful daughter and a hopeless wife, and I've had my eyes on that carving knife" the album is full of outbursts and jabs, the bitterness of a strong woman who chooses to explode, with tremendous self-control and elegance, rather than implode and collapse upon herself.

Musically, the album offers few stable points of reference, as always when talking about Kirsty MacColl, the real common thread is represented by the atmospheres and emotions, which in this case are particularly strong and well-defined, as an obvious consequence of the background on which "Titanic Days" has developed. One of the most iconic episodes of the album is certainly "Bad", with that intense, sensual, and smoothly bitter smoky nightclub atmosphere, which finds its natural confluence in the Latin-flavored blues rock of "Can't Stop Killing You", accompanied by the guitar of her friend Johnny Marr. In "Big Boy On A Saturday", an energetic and captivating anti-stupidity and superficiality anthem, power pop sounds with r'n'r reminiscences emerge, but more generally "Titanic Days" is also remembered as Kirsty's most electronic album, from the ecstatic new age chant of "Angel" to a melancholic ballad like "Don't Go Home", but above all the emotional melancholy of an epic title track and the bitter twilight disillusionment of "Tomorrow Never Comes", a sad but wonderful conclusion.

Nonetheless, the more folk side of Kirsty, which formed the backbone of "Electric Landlady," is not forgotten, and although significantly downsized, it manages to express itself in "You Know It's You", which as the first song in the lineup may seem slightly subdued but perfectly introduces the listener to the fragile emotional equilibrium on which the album unfolds, and especially two great highlights of "Titanic Days," the light, gentle and melancholic acoustic ballad "Last Day Of Summer", a masterpiece of melodic simplicity made even more splendid by Kirsty's unique voice and the most famous song of the album, "Soho Square", a symbol destined to remain forever associated with her memory, "One day I'll be waiting there, no empty bench in Soho Square", words of a girl who will never lose hope and the desire to live, engraved on a bench in the well-known London square, her monument that is not a statue but a simple and representative object, as she herself has never ceased to be.

From a more down-to-earth and strictly musical perspective, I cannot say that "Titanic Days" is her best album, and I would be shamelessly lying if I said that the Kirsty MacColl of episodes like "Angel", "Don't Go Home", and "Just Woke Up" is my favorite Kirsty, let's say that amidst marvelous and iconic songs, there are also some slightly weak episodes. This is certainly not the most suitable album for a first approach to her music and her personality, but for those who truly intend to know her, it becomes an essential and indispensable passage. "Titanic Days" is a slice of lived life even before an album, its sincerity, its high emotional value inevitably overshadow any other kind of judgment, so it must be for an album born from the heart and only much later, from reason.