“Sugar Still Melts In The Rain” by Sarah Mary Chadwick

"Sugar Still Melts In The Rain" by Sarah Mary Chadwick, is Northern Transmissions' 'Song of the Day'
Sarah Mary Chadwick

multi-instrumentalist and visual artist Sarah Mary Chadwick has announced her new album Sugar Still Melts In The Rain. and her debut for Sinderlyn.

After moving to Australia from her native New Zealand to pursue a career in music, Sarah spent a decade fronting the grunge band Batrider. Eventually becoming tired of the collaborative requirements intrinsic to band life, Sarah shifted her focus to songwriting independently, drawing inspiration from “weird old New Zealand musicians” like Peter Jefferies, Chris Knox, and Australia’s Pip Proud and the way they tinker away and work for decades for “little to no commercial success.” This inspiration is obvious in Sarah’s performance as she simultaneously savors and mocks the pedestal that her creativity affords her, acknowledging that “it’s a position of power being on a microphone” and how “it’s a desperate demand to be seen. It’s funny and really sad.”

Learning that Sarah’s songwriting is thoroughly autobiographical is perhaps more unnerving than her artistic process of watching sexually charged movies to inspire her pornographic art. She drinks, she watches porn, she draws and she writes. When the blur of the evening fades, what remains is a colorful orgy on the page and Sarah’s recollections immortalized in Sugar Still Melts In The Rain’s “Wind Wool”, “oh no I’m losing memory, did we just piss away time? And does it matter anyway, I’ll die, you died, we die…”. To Sarah Mary Chadwick, all tragedy is comedy.

Sugar Still Melts In The Rain marks her first release since 2016’s Rice Is Nice LP and her first for her new label Sinderlyn (home to Homeshake, Jaye Bartell and Tim Cohen). Having already released three solo records on Bedroom Suck, Siltbreeze and Rice Is Nice, this album is her 4th solo work. It was recorded and mixed by friend, musician and filmmaker Geoffrey O’Connor in Vanity Lair and Phaedra Studios in Melbourne. The album came together so quickly partly as a result of the duo’s commitment to efficiency and partly due to Sarah’s lack of attachment to the idea of “the perfect vocal take.”

Sarah Mary Chadwick
Sugar Still Melts In The Rain
Sinderlyn
May 11, 2018

1 – Flower Over Me
2 – It’s Never OK
3 – Bauble On A Chain
4 – Five Months
5 – Waiting On A Season
6 – Wind Wool
7 – I Won’t Say Goodbye
8 – Sugar Still Melts In The Rain
9 – Dance Slowly
10 – Felt My Heart
11 – Become Foam
12 – Lost Overwhelmed And Unsafe

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