On paper, Marlon Williams is an acclaimed country singer from Lyttelton, New Zealand, releasing his second album. While an old-timey, lovelorn sway still haunts Make Way for Love, “country” has never been the entire story. Williams’s roots-leaning, self-titled debut (2015) had a baroque undercurrent – check him out, feeding Aldous Harding tinned fruit in the video for that album’s Strange Things. Now, Make Way for Love finds Williams unleashing his inner crooner in the company of producer Noah Georgeson (Joanna Newsom). He brings to mind Roy Orbison or Richard Hawley, but then on songs such as Beautiful Dress and The Fire of Love Williams has a magnificent, fluttering, gender-fluid falsetto that recalls Anohni or Perfume Genius.
Party Boy, by contrast, is an injection of testosterone: full of pace and threat. The swoops and lulls of this lovely, miserable record all orbit one gravitational event: the dissolution of the relationship between Williams and Harding (an extraordinary talent in her own right). Intriguingly, Harding drops in to duet on the brittle, devastating Nobody Gets What They Want Anymore, the coda of which finds Williams mourning: “What am I gonna do when you’re in trouble / And you don’t call out for me?”
