In 2016, barely out of his teens, the British-Canadian singer-songwriter released a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Paper Thin Hotel”, a song about hearing the object of your affection making love in the room next door. By his own admission, he listened to “an unhealthy amount” of Cohen when he was young, so it’s not all that surprising that he has a penchant for melancholy and melodrama. And just as the late crooner did, he’s devoted much of his career to highlighting the complexity of relationships – and the heartache that tends to follow. His yearning, however, has never been as intense as on Hers.
As its title suggests, his new album is dedicated to one person, and most of it has been informed by the ups and downs of a serious long-term relationship rather than passing infatuations. Maltese now not only knows more about love and heartbreak but has also mastered the craft of writing music that is equally as mature. Hers is his most ambitious, artful and affecting record to date.
It’s also more timeless than anything in his back catalogue: each song sounds like it could have been written by Cole Porter, Chet Baker or Randy Newman and recorded anytime between 1940 and 1990. The arrangements feel warm and luscious, with plenty of strings, horns, woodwinds and background vocals to lend the sound the texture and depth it needs to do justice to the strong emotion the songs address. With longing as the central theme of the record, the music could easily veer into kitsch or sentimentality, but to his credit as both an artist and a producer, Maltese never indulges in excess.
In fact, he sometimes leaves you wanting more, as in album closer “Everybody’s Just As Crazy As Me” where you sense there is a grand finale coming only for the song to taper off instead. Maltese has had a flair for the unexpected ever since he started out, but so far it’s been a trait found mostly in his quirky, offbeat lyrics, not so much the instrumentation. On Hers, both the words and the music often make you stop in your tracks, raising a smile or prompting a gasp.
A dreamy clarinet is the first instrument you hear on opener “Arthouse Cinema” and, once the band has joined in, Maltese delivers the line “Agnes Varda, PTA [Paul Thomas Anderson] / What little movie will you watch today?” in his world-weary baritone. He then namechecks a couple more directors, but the track isn’t about art cinema, or only inasmuch as it offers a form of escapism and “helps to pause the real world”. Sadly, it won’t save you, he concludes. Nothing else will, as it turns out.
Each song offers more proof that romantic grief leaves you feeling broken and lost. Still, Maltese doesn’t mind his characters cutting pitiful figures. If anything, he sees being pathetic and vulnerable as a strength. “The best work is where you allow yourself to look pathetic,” he once said, and like some of the best English lyricists of the past forty-odd years – from Elvis Costello to Alex Turner, via Morrissey and Jarvis Cocker – he uses wit and self-deprecating humour to distract from emotional pain.
You’d be hard-pressed to pick your favourite line, but “God peaked making you” (from the dream-like, loungey “Tangled”), “Forever is too short / I wanna make love in the afterlife,” (from “Buses Replace Trains”, with strings straight out of a Douglas Sirk melodrama) and “He’d have to be clinically dead to not want you” (from the delightful 70s soul-funk-inspired “Always Some MF”) are top contenders. Elsewhere, he comes up with “motel suite” and the line “Sheets strained lilac with your menstrual blood”. Such creativity makes you wonder why he felt the need to tweak the name of a Michel Gondry film for a song title (“Eternal Darkness of the Spotted Mind”) or how the cliché “You’re who you are and no one else” passed muster.
But these slip-ups and the few times he doesn’t quite have the range to soar as high as the music are vastly outweighed by the brilliance with which he combines masterful instrumentation with lyrics that are both reflective and funny, turning the mundane into something profound without ever taking himself too seriously. Maltese has said that, for him, “the dream is always to make a song that you can hear in the background, and you think it might be some classic, old song, but then you listen to the lyrics and you’re like, ‘Oh…’”. On Hers, he fulfils his dream eleven times.
