Tiny Ruins - Brightly Painted One

This is where we find ourselves at the outset of New Zealander Hollie Fullbrook’s solo project-turned band Tiny Ruins’ sophomore release, Brightly Painted One. What Fullbrook does on the unambiguously titled opening track, “Me At The Museum, You In The Wintergardens”, so well is temper the song’s propensity for cloyingness with healthy dashes of reality and self-awareness. She acknowledges the forced composure – “we smile stealthily” – and gentle pretense of infatuated small talk – “we lie through our teeth” – while admitting to the illusory artifice of such a situation – “no one’s ever old/at the museum/no one’s ever cold/in the wintergarden”.

Fullbrook impressively displays such eye for emotional detail, complemented by an acuity for physical detail, throughout the album. She cleverly turns the perceived appeal of a logical, level-headed mate on its head in “Reasonable Man” asking, “when the going gets tough, where you going, reasonable man?” Fullbrook recognizes the need for balancing against routine and external influences on the swooning “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round”, declaring, “that old free will might be a myth/but I’m going to try and get me some”. There’s even room for absurdist levity on the lightly swinging “Straw Into Gold” as she croons, “we’re lumps of molasses/singing out our asses”. Interestingly enough, referring back to the opening track, Brightly Painted One’s tracks often convey themselves as artwork – exquisite, delicate, at times, old-fashioned – thanks to their subtle trimmings and Fullbrook’s lush lyricism.

On that note, the other day, I was discussing the merits of lyrics versus music in a song with a friend, who fairly surprisingly told me she was a “complete music over lyrics person”. I digressed as I am rather fond of lyrics, though did admit that I don’t hold them to equal stature, given the nature of what a song – as opposed to a poem – is; a musically superb song with mediocre lyrics is more acceptable than vice versa. Which brings me to my begrudging criticism of Brightly Painted One – as brilliant as Fullbrook’s words often are, her unwaveringly sleepy delivery and the impossibly sparse accompaniments make fully appreciating them a fairly rigorous task. The intermittent instrumental flourishes – the horns on “Straw Into Gold”, “Night Owl”s steely glissandos, the galloping coda on “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round” – add pinches of variety, but Fullbrook’s passive vocals and the occasional meandering, particularly mid-album, stifle their effects.

It’s tempting to think of Brightly Painted One as a “grower” of an album, and much of that depends on where you stand on the music/lyrics side of things. The problem is, for all of its evident beauty, it’s difficult to get inside – frustratingly so, as one can see when devoting the requisite, copious time and patience to take in all of Fullbrook’s wonderful words – and you wonder how much room there really is for the album to grow? In fact, the larger question is, with two similar albums now constructed within these limited confines, both of which clearly reveal their strengths and weaknesses, where does Tiny Ruins grow from here?