Sydney’s legendary The Apartments are back with a new album, ‘In and out of the light’, out on September 18th via Talitres Records. Peter Milton Walsh formed his charges in Brisbane back in 1978, and took them from Australia to firstly New York, then London when they were signed by Rough Trade, finally back to his home country.
From the new record, we’re honoured as well as delighted to premiere the new single ‘Pocketful of Sunshine’. Of the track, the band told us “After a show in Paris Peter Milton Walsh talked to someone who told him that Apartments songs had helped them through a hard time. While he’s drawn to all kinds of stories, he has always been interested in how people get themselves in trouble and how they deal with it. For some people an event has completely upturned their world. Life has thrown everything at them, and nothing is what it used to be. Yet they kept going. How? In writing Pocketful of Sunshine Peter was thinking about this. About what gets you through when things go wrong. What can lift you out of a world of trouble, up into the light. In these sorts of situations, people lean on one another. Find something in someone else they don’t have themselves. Someone who believes hope is in short supply will turn to someone who thinks there’s plenty left to spread around. Someone who can, in kindness, offer blue sky to those who just can’t see it. And purely by coincidence, as the world was suddenly turned upside-down and hope seemed hard to get a hold of, he found himself singing about blue sky, the kind of sky that will always be there. The sky that keeps us going, in and out the light.”
It’s not just classic Apartments, it’s classic songwriting, with the hopeful message wrapped up in keenly observed words and this devastatingly beautiful melody thats soaked in melancholy. Accompanied by little more than the strumming of a guitar and the gentle proddings from organ and trumpet, Milton Walsh weary, worldly baritone aches over the top, till it itself is wrapped up in vocal harmonies.
This might just be the most beautiful song of the year. Check it out, here
The Apartments – ‘In And Out Of The Light’ is released September 18th 2020 – CD/LP/DD – Talitres Records
