Nell Smith & The Flaming Lips
Where the Viaduct Looms

THE REVIEW

I’ll start from last Tuesday. After nine years, I had decided it was time to return a book: Mrs. C’s book. I can't tell you who Mrs. C is, under what circumstances I met her, or what the book is about. I reread it and prepared a thank-you note. So I set out. Finding the house again, from memories of two distant visits, after wandering through various streets, I rang the bell. I exchanged a few words with one of her daughters, whom I had never met, and, handing her the book, she told me what I didn’t know: her mother had passed away two months earlier.

I haven't yet had the courage to ask myself whether I arrived too late. Perhaps I’m hiding behind the sense of obligation towards that gesture, which needed to be made in any case. We never know enough, but our hearts always feel too much. Even more than we can bear.
Without rationalizing the pain—not mine, I’m not saying that—I instinctively set out in search of a record. Something I hadn’t been aware of until then. After some obligatory wanderings, I come across Nell Smith: I don’t mind her fragility, though in that, I imagine, she risks getting lost. Strange—a record of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds covers from just 2021…

The covers project is a quirky idea from Wayne Coyne and the Flaming Lips. Nell Smith is a complete unknown, or rather a fan of theirs, a Canadian teenager who goes to see them in Calgary accompanied by her parents; she dressed up as a parrot and screams every song from under the stage, while the Lips unleash that multi-layered psych rock for bogged-down fifty-year-olds (read “senile”; I count myself among them). The oddest thing, perhaps, is the choice of Cave, his songs—a repertoire the young Canadian, a rookie singer, doesn’t know at all. But maybe in Coyne’s mind there’s something like the opposition between William Blake’s Song of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The band crafts controlled, delicate, atmospheric arrangements, and young Nell, just 14, a soprano, sings angelically, softly, at times with a touch of effects, things like “Red Right Hand” or “The Ship Song,” “Weeping Song” or “No More Shall We Part,” truly giving voice to unforgettable tracks—giving them another voice, the imprint of a soul that hasn’t been exhausted in those words, but merely caresses them, touches them with another light: dim, tender, shimmering. What remains is a sense of respect before originals that conceal so much “evil” and seem the harsh rock of high mountains eroded by endless rains over the years. And yet, Coyne’s senseless plan stands up. Nell looks over her shoulder, seeking from her underground anti-idols the affirmation that she’s doing fine. And the game works well. And for me, in two days, this becomes a record to love. Desolately.

“The Girl in Amber,” which opens the album and which Cave praised, scratches me in a new way. In the video, Nelly is hit by a car. At seventeen, Nell Smith died for real in a car crash: that’s why this April a posthumous album was released. The only possible follow-up. She’d been working on it as a songwriter.
It won’t be Nell’s death that makes me laud the covers album.
It’s an album of rarefied beauty, but not scattered, still rock—another reading of wild, impetuous songs to which Coyne and friends bring only clarity, put in service of a slender voice, always one step from being lost, but gliding over the ice tracing lines of certain charm born from uncertainty.
Where the Viaduct Looms is a trembling of distances meeting in precarious balance, never overlapping, never belonging to each other. Perhaps not even touching. Just brushing. As happens in real life: often we long to lose ourselves in immense beauty, but we must content ourselves just to have contemplated it. Music tells you stories like this—like life, but with songs. Those, you can’t lose. You don’t know whether they’ll bring you back here or somewhere else. And you choose, at least for a while, to stay with them. You choose a true beauty for an uncertain joy.

Meanwhile, today, I need two flowers. But they should be three… for the exactness that I cannot tell you about.