Anastasiia Danyliuk
With haunting melodies shot through with bittersweet hope and yearning, Unreal Unearth (2023) is a testament to the beauty, sin, ugliness, and salvation of being human.
On August 18th, the Irish songwriter released Unreal Unearth, his third album featuring 16 mesmerizing tracks. After a stolen glimpse of the ‘Otherworld’ in ‘Eat Your Young’ EP and the rampaging tenderness of ‘Francesca’, Hozier’s map of the infamous nine circles of hell is finally complete.
EMBARKING ON A NEW JOURNEY
This album feels like the first lungful of autumn air. It is somehow both eerily familiar and relishing in the thrill of novelty.
In Unreal Unearth, Hozier continues to explore the topics of carnality, religion, the transience of human life, and fierce longing. ‘I, Carrion (Icarian)’ builds up to the haunting lyrics:
“If anything could fall at allIt’s the world that falls away from me”
Hozier’s semantic exploration of katabasis — a descent into the underworld — allows for a number of bold experiments in genre and lyric, while creating a new semantic dimension.
The songs are full of vivid images positioned firmly against a macabre backdrop. There is a blissfully disorienting darkness of limbo, the smell of singed feathers punctuating Icarus’ fall, and the shuddering excitement of the ascent.
https://twitter.com/Hozier/status/1692469931550384478
Sounds of an acoustic guitar draw listeners deep into this narrative in ‘De Selby (Part 1)’ and ‘I, Carrion (Icarian)’, whereas the piano in ‘Son of Nyx’ suspends the listener in anticipation.
The melody coils around the word “uiscefhuarithe,” an Irish word for something that has been made cold by water, addressed ‘To Someone From A Warm Climate’, who is wary of the cold. Finally, the melody melts into the euphory of ‘First Light’.
UNREAL UNEARTH AND INTERTEXTUALITY
Although references to various mythologies have always been a distinctive feature of Hozier’s work, Unreal Unearth takes intertextual reference one step further. Beyond the overarching motif of Dante’s Inferno, the album is brimming with allusions to literary and biblical works.
For instance, ‘First Time’ contains the lyrics:
“And the first time that you kissed meI drank dry the river LetheThe Liffey would have been softer on my stomach all the same”
‘De Selby (Part 1)’ draws its inspiration from The Third Policeman (1967) by Flann O’Brien, and the album cover is a playful reimagining of Not I (1972), an influential monologue by the 20th-century Irish dramatist Samuel Beckett. Not to mention the haunting echoes of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729) that resonate through the lines of ‘Eat Your Young’.
As a result, while listening to this record, the listeners become the tragic characters of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 AD). Each track feels like a life flown by, like breathing in a lungful of someone else’s hopes and sorrows.
Could it be that this is exactly how Dante felt while treading the land of shadows?
READ MORE:
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LIVE REVIEW: HOZIER ‘UNREAL UNEARTH’ AT SOUNDS OF THE CITY
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LIVE REVIEW: PULP AT THE CASTLEFIELD BOWL, MANCHESTER
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‘MERMAIDS’ BY FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE: SINGLE REVIEW
Featured image courtesy of Brendan T Lynch via Flickr. No changes have been made to this image. Image license found here.
