Montaigne has been making good music for a few years now so the arrival of her debut album Glorious Heights was met with suitable excitement by many. Any praise it receives is deserved, I can assure you.
Everybody feels pain. Some get lost in it, others manage to turn it into something beautiful. Montaigne is one of the proactive ones. Here’s an artist that is able to make music about traumatic experiences and make you feel really good about listening to it. While some of it is surely devastating, and your heart will go out to Montaigne, some of it truly is ‘glorious’, lifting you out of the mundane trough you’ve found yourself in to remind you what good pop music actually is. From cover to cover, as it were, Glorious Heights is a wonderment of emotional highs and lows, and an enthralling hour of unique vocals that can go anywhere.
Channelling, and inspired by some of her favourite acts including Arcade Fire, The National, and Bat For Lashes, Montaigne has crafted a pop album that never becomes sappy, never grows clichéd, and certainly never goes stale. A combination of her stunning voice and deft writing allows her to invigorate every track with a different energy, while still soaring through those choruses. Bulging with orchestral moments, handclaps, synths, quirky beats, acoustic riffs, and pianos, there’s too much interesting stuff happening to mention it all.
A lot of the time, established singles leading up to the release of an album feel like completely different entities once the full record is heard. While I was certainly excited to hear the new material, ‘Because I Love You’, ‘In The Dark’, and ‘Clip My Wings’ blended in seamlessly and were in fact a good lead into what the album would provide us with. Opener ‘Glorious Heights’ immediately feels like another roaring single. Montaigne is busy and quick on the microphone during one of the most energetic songs on the album, before leading into an atmospherical chorus, setting up perfectly the tracks to succeed it, one of which is ‘Till It Kills Me’. Another of the new songs, it’s a bristling track that has Montaigne yelling at full volume as she performs an exorcism of her struggles.
The best thing about Montaigne is that there’s something organic going on. You can trust her songs, nothing feels contrived. While most praise might be reserved for her voice and the musical composition of the album is undoubtedly superb but it would all fall short without the writing. The balance she creates in the narrative here is the sure sign of a really talented performer. Topics such as heartbreak and emotional pain can be difficult to manage in song writing. If not executed right, the songs can sound like self-pity or melodrama. With Montaigne, the sheer honesty of her soul shines through, and thus the emotional punch we receive is strong indeed. There’s no better example of this than ‘Consolation Prize’, as the album takes a more delicate step at the halfway mark. Those people with hairless bodies are missing out because this song had all of mine standing up. A stripped-back, gentle musical piece is meshed with an extremely vulnerable delivery from Montaigne to create a chillingly sad song, but one that also sees her coming out the other side.
Those lyrics; “Eat your heart out, I’ll crawl. I am alive and here after all. I am alive, that’s my consolation prize.”
Usually, one might consider a lull in a the middle of an album to be filler, or consisting of songs that are links to a booming finish, but here it’s almost the highlight of the record. It couples well with ‘Lie To Myself’, another very pretty song that isn’t gifted with the hooks of a single but is just as effective, once again thanks to Montaigne’s writing and infinitely diverse vocal ability. It’s true, the album does pick up again in the latter stages, wrapping up powerfully with ‘I Am Behind You’. It’s a triumphant end that could just as easy have been the beginning and I wouldn’t have complained about listening to a further 12 tracks.
Overall, Glorious Heights is a delicious listen, whether you want to enjoy the musical composition or Montaigne’s incredible voice. Bring them together and you have perhaps one of the best pop debuts Australia has seen in a long time. This album just makes you want to be friends with Montaigne, and having spoken with her, Jess Cerro is the same in real life. I’m positive this is only the very beginning for a supremely talented artist.
