“The record is about the search for empathy and compassion, kindness and connection, and the conclusion that it is quite absent in our social exchanges these days.”
The pop Australian singer, Josef Salvat is back with an interlude of upbeat vulnerable reflectivity that leave us with more than a few anthems to weave through the innate idiosyncrasies of modernity. His new album ‘Modern Anxiety’ outlines the nuanced annoyances of mundainity and perhaps the overarching residue of dissonance from compounding outlets of connectivity.
The opening scene of the music video for the track ‘Modern Anxiety’ plays with the endless inundating scrolling that we love to hate and hate to love. Salvat is amassed, juxtaposed with likes, messages, comments as he moves through the discerning lyricism that beckons the viewer, to perhaps slow down and do the same. It’s a poetic portrait of not only the raw emotionality post breakup, but the bleak landscape of the internet that echoes, like a vast unending landscape, only making an isolated escape louder.
Salvat is really commanding a look into the subtle ways we connect and come undone and the endless presence of something more to be, to miss, to feel, to look upon.
The entire body of work is a discerning juxtaposition of both the upbeat pop sentimentality with the rather bleak and sobering examination of anxiety that curtails our peace both in life and love. His voice has the power and delicacy of a new found sunrise as he melodically bellows on ‘Paper Moons’ “you keep asking me to save you but it never works, I don’t know why you’re so committed to your pain.” He gives us a radical truth with a unique oscillation of electronic sound patterns that perfectly frame and usher in the power of his vocals.
The entire album is a beautiful assemblage of the ways we hurt, how we fall short, how we rise and how we begin again. There is a captivating dizzying quality when you listen, as if Salvat is transporting us to the inner bindings of his heart. There is inertia and there is quiet in the unraveling of the emotional.
With an amassed point of alchemy, Josef Salvat bravely dedicates his 10 tracks to the listener to orchestrate a new prayer of moving through the darkest points to intersect a vision for the brightest awakening.
8/10
Words: Rae Niwa
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