Tirzah - 'Send Me'

April 14, 2021 - Domino

Three years after her first full-length studio album Devotion, UK-singer-songwriter Tirzah is splashing the surface of our endless pond again with her new single ‘Send Me,’ and it’s a stream-of-consciousness from the shadows, distant and moody, with a far more brooding presence than the rhapsody of her other life in 2018. It is, of course, an understatement to say we’ve seen some things that have bloodied the garden since then. Tirzah’s return to something subterranean is logical and welcome. As scary as darkness can be, we came from the darkness first, and it is a comforting shelter when times are confusing or challenging. 

From the beginning, ‘Send Me’ lays down a plodding rock-n-roll beat and an electric guitar riff as its undercurrent, with a sultry fatalistic melody evocative of the drowning sensation of The Police’s ‘Message In A Bottle.’ It is slowed down with a weary energy, as though the reference is trapped in petrified Jell-O like amber, the rock stars as the bug that has given up its manic struggle. The instrumentation remains simple throughout, a musical mode we all are familiar with because we hear it in the backgrounds of shopping malls and convenience stores. Here it exists mostly to give the song its structure and keep it weighted down, while Tirzah sings to us her contemplation of recovery and her grappling with identities.

Wielding a poet’s tool of repetition, the lyrics spin like a pendulum on a distant planet where the force of gravity is inconsistent. “Let me heal and now I’m sure, now I’m sure, now I’m sure” she croons, close to the microphone, minimal dynamic range, an eerie calm, a tender mantra. She’s opened the window for us to see her inner world but she isn’t explaining what we’re seeing explicitly. Instead, a playful rumination unfolds, where layers of meaning are overlapped in the folds of repeated words. It is at once an internal dialogue and a conversation with another. I begin thinking about what exactly the substance of “more” is as it shifts: “let me, let me heal, then wait for more” and “let me, let me heal, wait some more” and “need more to feel strong.” I listen as her meaning oscillates from “call me, Zombie” to “call me Zombie” in my head, and the whole experience has the same effect as repeating a single word over and over in your head until it’s completely objectified and you don’t know what it means anymore. It’s an effective way for Tirzah to keep us at arm’s length, so we can connect with her emotion while she remains safe in the cavern, regenerating, reanimating. 

We tend to think of healing as a linear journey from the state of “hurt” to the state of “healed,” which is how we perceive our recovery from a papercut. Unlike skin, though, the human mind runs in continuous nonlinear circles. Healing of the mind and soul is an infinity of sorts, a state of forever becoming healed. When Tirzah sings “let me heal and now I’m sure, now I’m sure, now I’m sure,” it’s an open progression of the mind like a diary, becoming sure then unsure then sure again in one temporal moment. We are objects in motion, not objects that have arrived. I again applaud her honest free association. It creates organic depth in her music, which is another return of sorts, a rejection of the digital polish of our digital age to something more fundamentally human. 

‘Send Me’ ends with a surprising—but in hindsight not unexpected—90s grunge guitar epilogue. It’s a final auditory underline to an empowering new direction for Tirzah, a new and longer belay rope for dropping into new depths, a new set of identities to travel with, and an old but solid set of tools to take into this new future. ☔