The Apartments fans were right in wanting to finance the return to the scene of the Australian band led by Peter Walsh (a musician who took his first steps in the late 70s with the Go-Betweens) ten years ago. What happened after the campaign crowdfunding for the album “No Song, No Spell, No Madrigal” is a small miracle.
After eighteen years of absence, the band was reborn like a phoenix from the ashes. “That's What The Music Is For” is an intense and refined project like the previous ones if not even more solid. The cultured chamber-pop of the Apartments is a continuous succession of snapshots that tell of lonely and cold nights spent in search of a shoulder on which to rest, a fleeting consolation before being kidnapped by the oblivion of indifference and glasses of alcohol consumed without much need.
That of the Apartments is a world apart, an oasis where the exquisite perfection of the arrangements and the fragility of a voice worn by time resonate like a poetic scream entrusted to the wind and autumn weather. Peter Walsh digs into the depths of the soul with lyrical and musical outlines that have the same intensity as Blue Nile (the stupendous and poignant “It's A Casino Life”) and raises a smile with a light guitar vibration and a rhythmic crescendo that beats like the heart when waking up after a dream (“A Handful Of Tomorrow”).
There is never complacency or languor in Walsh's melancholy compositions. At times a breath of wind and brass keeps alive the vitality of slightly more sad and indolent ballads (“Another Sun Gone Down”), but above all the solid formation of eight elements is the surprise of “That's What The Music Is For”: the amalgam of voices and instruments of the title track it is pure sonic and emotional perfection, a slow crescendo that does not aim for emphasis but for detail and that poetic vulnerability in which everyone can recognize themselves. These are songs that do not fear the wear and tear of time: past (“The American Resistance”) and present (“Afternoons”) are told with equal harshness and candor, entrusting a cloud of emotions that are not always easy to dominate to a few notes on the piano or guitar.
The Apartments' songs are not suitable for fleeting and distracted consumption, they are tales of pain and rebirth (Walsh broke up the band in 1997 due to the death of his son), framed with a craftsmanship that recalls the Blue Nile of “Hats”: “Death Would Be My Best Career Move” has the same incipit of the Scottish band's “Over The Hillside”.
“That's What The Music Is For” is a nocturnal, autumnal album, but suitable for all seasons of the heart. With each listen, the eight tracks come to life with new shades of color, some are even allowed to hover above the gray clouds that dominate the cover. And that's what happens in the last track, “You Know We're Not Supposed To Feel This Way”, a bittersweet song with slightly epic tones that the band frames with a performance full of pathos, where each instrumental element fits together like in a mosaic, a succession of ripples and waves that rests on soundscapes full of melancholy, and then makes hope resurface.
25/10/2025
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
