【搬运】【译】叉婊Pitchfork评Hozier 2019年专辑《Wasteland， Baby！》
搬运自：微信公众号【评论搬一堆】（在原文基础上添加了英语原文与排版调整）
翻译：Lynn Liu
校正：WhitneyL
The man who took us to church tries to take us to the same church, again, 14 times, six years later.
这个曾带我们前往教堂的男人，6年后，也就是现在，想再次带我们去同样的教堂，这回是14次。
Like a desperate magician guessing card after card until he arrives at the one in your hand, Andrew Hozier-Byrne spends much of his second album stumbling through a simple trick. To kick off his first full-length in five years, the platinum-selling Irish singer-songwriter celebrates the legends who spoke truth to power, as he shouts out a veritable VH1 marathon’s worth of greats: Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, John Lennon, James Brown, Joni Mitchell, Mavis Staples, Patti Smith, Marvin Gaye, and more are name-checked during the opening song “Nina Cried Power.” The message is simple. All of these people made a difference, and, whoever you are, wherever you are, at least one of them probably means something to you. Why dwell in hopelessness when you can join the choir?
就像一位绝望的魔术师一样，一遍又一遍地猜着你手中的扑克牌，直到猜中为止。Andrew Hozier-Byrne在他的第二张专辑中费了很大力气才展现了一个简单的小把戏。五年前他第一张专辑发行的时候，这位销量过百万的爱尔兰唱作歌手歌颂了那些敢于在权力面前诉说真相的传奇歌手，由此，他喊话到，VH1马拉松真正的价值就在于这些伟人：Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, John Lennon, James Brown, Joni Mitchell, Mavis Staples, Patti Smith, Marvin Gaye,还有许多名字在专辑首单“Nina Cried Power”中出现。它所传达的信息很简单。这些人产生了巨大的影响，无论你是谁，无论你身处何地，他们中至少有一个人可能对你很重要。当你跟着轻声哼唱的时候，为什么还要活在绝望之中呢？
It’s a well-meaning call to action that’s paid dividends in the past. “Take Me to Church” is both the title of Hozier’s career-making 2013 single and also his imagined purpose as a songwriter—a purveyor of good will, packaged in radio anthems designed to be sung at the top of your lungs. In his music and interviews, the soft-spoken 28-year-old is passionate about noble causes, from LGBTQ awareness to the Irish nurses’ strike and the opioid crisis. Standing at six-foot-five, with chiseled features and the occasional man-bun, the mononymic singer even has a kind of Christ-like aura, or at least downmarket Russell Brand. His mother, the visual artist Raine Hozier-Byrne, designed his latest album cover in a process that involved submerging her son underwater for extended periods of time: “I had said to mum,” he joked dryly, “Just try to think of the album sales if I do die on this shoot!”
这个善意的呼吁在以前就已经得到了回应。“Take Me to Church”既是Hozier在2013年可称作其事业里程碑单曲的标题，也是他想要成为唱作歌手的目标—— 成为一名善意的传播者，让他的赞歌在收音机中流传，萦绕于他人心头歌唱。在他的音乐还有采访中，这位温柔的28岁歌手对他崇高的职业抱有热情，从LGBT意识到爱尔兰护士罢工，再到**类药物危机。这位6.5英尺（约1.98米）高的歌手，轮廓分明，留着man-bun发型，这位留名的方式成名（译者注：若外国某个名人以隐去姓只留名的方式成名（mononym），那么中文称呼就变成对这个名字单独的翻译）的歌手甚至有一种像基督一样的光环，或者至少像是低配版的Russell Brand（拉塞尔·布兰德）。Hozier的母亲是一位视觉艺术家，名为Raine Hozier-Byrne，她设计了Hozier的新专辑封面，在创作过程中，她让Hozier长时间浸在水中，“我必须要和我母亲说”他冷冷地开玩笑道：“如果我在拍摄（封面）的过程中不幸去世的话，就努力想想专辑销量吧！”
Another thing: he’s got a gorgeous voice. Booming and effervescent, it’s an instrument that communicates passion, adventure, and wisdom, all to the extent that transcribing his lyrics seems to be somewhat missing the point. There’s a reason why most people didn’t realize that “Take Me to Church” is a protest song about the Catholic Church. Like Foster the People’s similarly out-of-nowhere smash “Pumped Up Kicks,” it seemed to ascend the charts solely on hummable hooks and crowd-pleasing adrenaline. Such strengths are a sweet but elusive currency. Analyze a beautiful day and it’s already over. At 14 tracks in roughly an hour, Wasteland, Baby! falls prey to the humdrum, all its power wrung dry.
另一件事：他拥有极好的嗓音——如此让人兴奋，如此受到欢迎，它是一种传达激情、冒险和智慧的工具，在某种程度上，翻唱他的歌曲时似乎有些让人拿捏不准轻重。这就是为什么大多数人并没有意识到“Take Me to Church”的是一首抗议天主教堂的歌。就像Foster the People无处不在的劲爆单曲“Pumped Up Kicks”一样，它似乎仅仅凭借着简单洗脑的旋律，让听众肾上腺激素大增就轻松登上排行榜。这样的力量既让人感到幸福却也同时让人感到这是一种难以捉摸的流行。细细分析这美好的一天，它早已结束。《Wasteland, Baby!》的14首单曲的时长近1个小时，这张专辑已沦为单调的牺牲品，它的所有力量都干涸了。
The record’s pitfalls are nothing new for major-label artists attempting to follow a surprise hit. Nearly every element of “Take Me to Church” is isolated and recycled here in the hopes of crowning a successor: God is not in the house. The aid of a gospel choir doesn’t make the awkward one-word refrain of “To Noise Making (Sing)” sound like something worth singing along to, just as the slow-build, stomp-clap murk of “Movement” mostly invites you to avert eye contact from the back of the room. Even just the central refrains of these songs—Sing! Move! Now!—suggest an unbecoming directness. Rock stars make us want to join in on the fun; wedding singers and youth group leaders demand it.
这张唱片的缺陷对于那些试图追求惊喜的主流艺术家来说并不是什么新鲜事。几乎“Take Me to Church”中的每一个元素都是独立的，在这里被无限循环，以及为继承者加冕：上帝不在这栋房子里。福音唱诗班的帮助并没有使“To Noise Making (Sing)”里尴尬的单字副歌听起来像更引人注目，就像在 “Movement”这首歌中缓慢的、跺脚-拍手声的阴暗很可能会让你将注意力转移到别处。即使只是这些歌曲中的副歌——唱吧！动吧！就是现在！——暗示着一种不相称的直接性。摇滚明星们想让我们加入到其中的乐趣中；婚礼歌手和年轻乐队主唱更强烈要求我们加入其中。
Hozier has always had a subtle dark streak, and you can sense him trying to wield his moods in new ways. He now deals in spacier arrangements, heavier guitars, and harsher lyrics. (“No Plan” takes aim at the “screaming, heaving fuckery of the world.” Hoo-ah!) Most successful is a ballad called “Shrike” that also appeared on last year’s Nina Cried Power EP. It’s stark and fingerpicked, with gestures toward traditional Irish folk music. His bellowed vocals exude a down-home intimacy that makes me consider the strange path that led us toward pop music that sounds like this. It maybe begins with the Black Keys and Danger Mouse’s lite psychedelic blues and weaves through the Lumineers’ audience-participation folk-pop; it rides in the sidecar of Adele’s torch ballad supernovas and stops just short of Alabama Shakes’ riotous pearly gates. It wants badly to sound timeless but it already feels like a moment that’s passed. Ed Sheeran and James Bay, two of Hozier’s peers, have attempted to evolve by writing fake Rihanna songs and cutting their hair, respectively. Hozier’s unease about the future is palpable.
Hozier的性格中总存在着一个敏感的黑暗面，你能感受到他试图用新方式来操纵他的情绪。他现在沉溺于更有空间感的编曲，更深沉的吉他音，和更加尖锐的歌词。[“No Plan”的目标是““screaming, heaving fuckery of the world.（高声尖啸着对世界的厌恶，咒骂着荒唐的世界（中文歌词于网易云音乐））” Hoo-ah!”（啊哈！）]最成功的当属名为“Shrike”的抒情歌曲了，它也出现在去年的Nina Cried Power的迷你专辑上。这首歌的吉他指法直截了当，表现出了爱尔兰传统民间音乐的姿态。他咆哮的声音散发出一种淳朴热情的亲密感，这让我感到被引向了一条奇怪的道路，它竟然能够把我们引向这样的流行音乐。它可能以the Black Keys 和Danger Mouse的轻微迷幻蓝调开始，穿梭于the Lumineers中与观众互动的民谣，基于Adele的超火抒情单曲，最后到达了Alabama Shakes乐队狂欢的天堂之门。它急着想要达到永垂不朽的高度，可它却同时也给人一种转瞬即逝的感受。与Hozier同时代的两名歌手Ed Sheeran和 James Bay，前者曾尝试过创作仿蕾哈娜的音乐，后者则剪去他的长发。Hozier对未来的不安是明显的。
The way Hozier tells it, he wrote Wasteland, Baby!’s title track after reading how threats of nuclear war caused the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move our doomsday clock ahead 30 seconds—an event that resulted in the BBC using the word “apocalypse” in a headline. And yet, he sees a little light. “All the fear and fire of the end of the world,” he sings gently, “Happens each time a boy falls in love with a girl.” He’s not the first songwriter to lament the small apocalypses that occur every day, or how love’s temporal nature is also what makes it special. And to hear him sing it—his voice coated in an unearthly burble atop humble, fingerpicked acoustic guitar—is to hear him acknowledge his limitations. After all, churches are where we celebrate life’s fiery beginnings and endings, but the truth is, we spend most of our time somewhere in the middle, consumed by an earnest and unglamorous everyday kind of searching. Without meaning or direction, it might, given a voice, sound something like this.
Hozier了解了由于核战争的威胁，《原子科学家公报》将世界末日来临之时提前了30秒——这个事件让BBC在标题上使用了“末日启示”一词，由此他创作了《Wasteland, Baby!》这张专辑。然而，他看到了一点希望。“All the fear and fire of the end of the world（世界末日所有的恐惧和希望）”他轻唱到，“Happens each time a boy falls in love with a girl（每当男孩爱上一个女孩时都会发生）”。他并不是第一个为每天发生的小范围"世界末日"而哀悼的唱作人，也不是第一个为爱的稍纵即逝而感到特别的人。当听到他歌唱的时候——他的声音为这质朴的、指弹吉他音叠加上了一种神秘的空灵感。毕竟，教堂是我们庆祝生命中炙热的起点和终点的地方，但事实却是，我们大部分时间都花在中间的某个地方，被一种索然无味、日复一日的追逐所消耗。如果没有任何意义或方向，它可能仅仅有其独特声线，但其音乐作品也仅在于此。
