MARLON WILLIAMS – TE WHARE TIWEKAWEKA: REVIEW
- Bernard Zuel
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
MARLON WILLIAMS
Te Whare Tiwekaweka (Independent/Secretly Distribution)
MIDWAY THROUGH LAST YEAR, in a City Recital Hall show that began in darkness and finished in lamp-light, Marlon Williams sang in English and te reo Māori, sang originals and covers (including a near-hymnal First Time Ever I Saw Your Face), and in one of the loveliest shows of the year, offered a kind of universality.
Tenderness and community, connection and sorrow, beauty and distance, humour and heaviness – it was all there and all understood. As I said in my review, whether we grasped the exact words or not, “we sighed at the quiet frankness of that tone” via a voice that is unlike anything around these days.
This new album finds Williams taking this further, indeed taking it to its natural next step: not just all the songs in te reo Māori (a number of which some of us heard for the first time on that 2024 tour), but an album steeped in a personal experience of historical and contemporary resonance. Inside these songs there is rock ‘n’ roll, soul, traditional and modern harmonies, a guest rapper in Kommi and guest singer in Lorde, choral arrangements around fully exposed solo voice, a cappella moments, sparse feels, and in various forms the involvement of his regular band, Ben Woolley, Gus Agars and Dave Khan, alongside the voices of the Maori performing group, He Waka Kōtuia.
All of which may sound like a lot, but in fact operate as shadings and shapings of core principles. These are so often quite beautiful songs, but also bursting with life and a continuing ability to tell stories, or in Kahore He Manu E, with Lorde, the ability to tell us things beyond the story.
Korero Maori, pushed by acoustic guitar over the twang of steel guitar, and loaded with bouncing back-and-forth vocals is light and propulsive, welcoming in its evident enjoyment. But in Ko Tena Ua, Williams serenades over a simply picked guitar, a thought that deepens with a second vocal line, bringing a more complex emotion over humming keyboard, then an almost Eno-esque intersection of limpid tones and gently springing art rock bass sets the scene for a wavering-voiced denouement.
(There’s even more Eno, in his collaborations with Robert Fripp, in Panaki, a song that might have turned up on Before And After Science.)
The church base of Huri te Whenua becomes even more interesting when firstly Kommi, his delivery quietly propulsive, and then a chorus of voices, deliberately less refined, build on it. And Whakameatia Mai is a country song in all but name, a connection that would be familiar to indigenous Australians as much as some of us who grew up in Mauritian families where both trad country and the sparklier countrypolitan found fertile soil in existing communal habits.
The unaccompanied E Mawahe Ana Au seeks neither power nor decoration and works just as effectively, opening the album with a sense of opening the door and beckoning us forward. But at the other end of the sonic spectrum there is a quite gorgeous farewell in the final track, Pokaia Ra te Marama, that actually opens the door further, widening that welcome with its multiple voices, pedal steel and, finally, a gentle evocation of ‘70s surf instrumentals.
If that sounds unlikely or just odd, that’s only because you haven’t spent enough time with Marlon Williams.
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