Beginning with just a brief bit of paradisiacal birdsong, Melanie Martinez’s fourth album ‘HADES’ jumps right into its gorgeous hell-storm of musical majesty with opening track ‘Garbage’. Plucked strings, gun shots and church bells swirl to usher in this theatrical feat of wonderment – a grandly beautiful entrance for the ‘HADES’ era.
No stranger to dramatic and visually-arresting images, literal and sonic, Martinez paints a conflicting soundscape of America at this most perilous moment as ‘Garbage’ winds its introductory way down a dark and mesmerizing path:
Militant freaks hovering over the sky
So you better run for the forest
And we’re all under their cold watchful eye
So you better hide what you’re growin’
Lookin’ out for yourself won’t get you far
Better make peace with your people
There can be beauty among trying times
We can push through all the evil
A beautiful Jesus-looking figure named Hades is the treacherous temptation on display in ‘Is This A Cult?’ before Martinez lets loose with some of the most deviously diabolical lyrics, backed by equally-demoniacal music:
All of my girls wear whatever they wanna
No men allowed ’cause they wanna control us
We grow our own food and don’t need no money
Everything’s free, and we have our autonomy
Is this a cult? Or is it home?
We see the future and get what we want
We killed the leader, and now we’re on top
Is this a cult? Can I come home?
We make the rules, and we love on the land
We fuck ourselves better than they can.
A dystopian vision is being built – insidiously, viciously, gloriously – and with a certain element of undeniable delicate beauty thanks to Martinez’s voice – ethereal, soothing, tender, and heartbreakingly human, even amid the ruinous machinations at work here. Fairy tales get turned on their fairy heads, the string-tastic one-two-punch bombast of ‘Disney Princess’ and ‘Grudges’ promising a world that wants to defang our prettiest monsters – and the pretty monsters refusing to blunt their incisors.
I just wanna burn bridges and kill bitches
And pour their medicine in their mouth and give them a taste
In a musical time where the two-and-a-half minute song is a standard bearer for all that anyone under twenty can digest, ‘HADES’ is a magnificently fully-fleshed out world – the very illustration of album as art form – with songs that take their time to develop, and an overall arc that leaves one gratifyingly gasping for more. By the time the album reaches its apex and midpoint with ‘Avoidant’ and ‘Monolith’, love in its ambivalent and most heartrending ways arrives to temper the tempest at hand, and it’s almost enough to make one believe in an almost-happy ending.
If the fall of our memory comes to be true, then I’ll know I did everything I could do
To show you the depth of what love can pursue
When you’re out there talking to someone new
Think of everything that I have given you
Maybe she can get some of that, too, that’s what my love can do
Alas, love would never prove such a savior, not when it could cause such hurt, not when it could inflict such pain – and never in a world where things like ‘Weight Watchers’ and ‘The Plague’ exist. One of Martinez’s greatest strengths is balancing the tension of how to push through and make sense of such a mad world – how to be human when we are hellbent on being superhuman or inherently evil. As disturbing as the imagery and lyrics are in a song like ‘The Plague’, the music carries us along, a cough or two working perfectly in each of the dance breaks. It shifts seamlessly into ‘Batshit Intelligence’ where things get even more dystopian, and the sonic wind is so enthralling you almost don’t mind where we’re headed, or perhaps where we’ve already landed. Around us the discarded inhabitants of the ‘Gutter’ are paraded to jail, or worse, as Martinez begs that we “don’t get immune to this” over a vaguely circus-like musical meandering.
A haunting choir opens ‘The Vatican’, defiantly setting up the last section of ‘Hades’ – and this banger is a majestic fuck-off highlight of religious indictment:
Money power got its chokehold on humanity
Nothing gives these motherfuckers quite a boner
Like religion, Catholic, Christian, kissing Jesus, licking AR-15s
It’s so homoerotic, the way you pray to men
And treat your women like the Leviathan
Come out the closet/ Sip my holy water/ Pray to this pussy/ Confess your sins
Oh Melanie, now you are speaking my language and I’m down on my knees and waiting for you to take me there. Weaving in the patriarchal hypocrisy and evils inherent in all the evangelical bullshit, ‘The Vatican’ is this generation’s ‘Like A Prayer‘ taken to an incendiary extreme – precisely what this space in time needs. Finally descending to ‘Hell’s Front Porch’, Martinez gives in to the awfulness around us – because there’s no more denying that we’re fucked and there may not be a way out of it anymore – and the music swells to the point where we’re just “Fuckin’, sweatin’, dancin’ on hell’s front porch, baby…“
‘Chatroom’ may be the most perfect encapsulation of how people connect (or more pointedly don’t quite) in today’s online world, and as grim as some of the observations are and how deeply they pierce the heart, the music retains some small bit of hope among the disappointment and anger at constant work.
When I stare out the window, crying
It’s ’cause you’ve made me hate my reflection
In another reality, I could’ve loved myself, I could’ve been myself
But here I am cramming all of your words deep into my veins till it kills me
Burning boldly right up until the very end, ‘The Last Two People on Earth’ brings us to the final days, and the only thing left to do is carnally express ourselves, blowing up “like a volcano/ Catastrophic orgasm that can wipe out a whole nation.” The one act that is creation and destruction at once – the one act that is love and hate and desire and annihilation – the one act that brings us heaven and hell, fire and ice, rendering words and music into mere echoes: the act of the fuck.
When Hades burns over…
