Before he re-ignited the music career he’d left dormant in the early 1990s and transplanted himself to the hipster haven of Brooklyn, New York, Michael Halloran was an academic at La Trobe University, specialising in social psychology. He may have moved on from academia, but you can still hear the social psychologist within on Halloran’s latest album, Phantom.
There’s a sense of psycho-cultural detritus in the opening track, Unbearable Lightness of Being, alluding to drugs as a failed antidote to emotional despair, a search for identity in an existential fog. Forgotten Days searches through the scraps of a past life, trying in vain to find something worth keeping while always moving on; Oh Love is a lament for a love once seen but never genuinely embraced; Adam’s Curse looks through a distant Biblical lens, asking for forgiveness; and Don’t Cry is an admission of failure, when all apologies have fallen on deaf ears.
But with the second side comes redemption and something approaching contentment. On Roses Red Violets Blue Halloran channels the country blues noir of Clinkerfield in his quest for emotional salvation; Straight and True is a protestation of character and assertion of self-belief; We Could Be Stars sounds threatening but the message is prophetic, if only the narrator can be heard; There or Eternity constructs the uncertainty of romance as a binary enquiry; and Hip to Hip he suggests the answer is given, even if it’s just for the moment, as beautiful as it is.
As Phantom rolls to its climactic conclusion, the lightness of humanity remains flickering. Halloran knows just how to mine the good, the bad and the ugly of the human condition.
BY PATRICK EMERY
