Having built a career with Wildbirds and Peacedrums that is bold and sometimes raucous, and solo albums that lean more pop, Mariam Wallentin uses her latest album to convey a quieter strength. Breathing Techniques, her third solo album under the Mariam the Believer guise, comes across as strikingly subdued in the context of her previous work. It also features her most inventive instrumentation.
‘Misty’ opens with the semi-surreal dichotomy of harp strumming and droning strings in a tangle under her voice. The song slowly becomes less dissonant, the strings unraveling, drums making a rare, steadfast appearance, and piano building a shape for the song.
Wallentin unrolls the variations in her songs like a quilt, sometimes disparate pieces stitched together into a whole work. She allows for massive amounts of space in her arrangements, at times creating more of a tag-team effort among instruments. The overall effect is understated; even when the string arrangements of album closer ‘Highest Peak’ evoke a cinematic richness, there is no bombast.
The album has a gentleness rather than an immediacy, and a first listen can feel outright sombre. On the title track, primarily underscored by a melancholic string refrain and plodding piano chords, Wallentin relays her past struggles. But it’s also illustrative of a broader theme on the album: the hard-won personal growth of emerging from those struggles.
This subdued approach extends to her vocals as well. Wallentin is capable of pushing her voice pretty far in terms of both range and intensity. Instead she chooses to limit her range in service to the richer instrumentation of Breathing Techniques. When she does emphasise her voice, it’s by singing a cappella, allowing her to be vulnerable while maintaining calm and composure.
While Wallentin doesn’t seem to have an appetite for the dramatic on this album, she is not emotionally distant. Her composure is something to impart the listener with rather than provoke them. And almost as if to prove that she isn’t trying to be too serious all the time, there is runaway piano noodling on the outros of songs ‘A Heart’ and ‘Breathing Techniques’ that feels like sly glances away from their earnestness.
Wallentin still has some nods to her pop-oriented side: the trotting rhythm of ‘Home’, the energy that ‘A Heart’ bounces in on, the sharp string rhythm that builds momentum on ‘Dreams’. Ultimately, however, she is too interested in exploring for songs to really have a hook. In that way, she allows the structure of the songs to have the same growth that she channels through her lyrics.
