Jen Cloher – I Am The River, The River Is Me (Album Review)

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Jen Cloher -Part way through Mana Takatapui, the opening track of Jen Cloher’s I Am the River, The River is Me, there’s a melodic flourish that feels vaguely reminiscent of the bouncy guitar riff in George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord. Half a century later, Cloher’s record is also deeply spiritual but one that addresses not a personal deity but rather the essence of belonging.

Cloher’s name is not familiar in New Zealand but should be. Australian by birth and Melbourne based, their mother was Ngāpuhi and a descendant of the warrior chief Hongi Hika.

Jen Cloher
Photo Credit: Marcelle Bradbeer

The songs on this album comprise a carefully curated cycle narrating a return to their ancestral home and an immersion in not just whakapapa but also in the spiritual flow of place itself. The interweaving of sound and words, and of our two languages is masterful. In the beautiful Harakeke, for instance, lyrics segue between te reo and English with ease, creating a seamlessly dreamlike fabric. As in its title, it’s a tukutuku panel of a song.

The album’s most pulsing words and rhythm comes in the third track, My Witch in which she implores a mystical yet carnal lover to ‘pull me and hold me down’ then repeats ‘more than a feeling’. Boston may have had a 70s hit of that name, but Cloher’s reiteration of these four words is far sexier.

Being Human, offers further window into the song writer’s self-discovery. (‘…learning how to let go of what you think you know/ staying human is listening, listening’). Perhaps reinforced by the reference to 17 in the song, there’s a hint of Sharon Van Etten in this track. But that suggestion is rapidly overtaken by Cloher’s distinctive vantage point, referencing being a ‘Maori Pakeha’ and living on ‘stolen land I cannot possess’. The song becomes more like a clarion call of Midnight Oil. But its  deeply anchored in Aotearoa, ending with the gusto of background voices taking over to chant ‘rangitriritanga!’

The title track I Am the River, The River is Me is the album’s centrepiece. Its conversational style suggests the songwriter being addressed by the river of their ancestral affiliation (in which she is immersed on the album cover). To an insistent background strum, it’s as if the river is talking. Inspired perhaps by the move to legally (re) attribute personhood to significant geographical features, the song is both deeply personal and political. There is something soaring and mystical as it ends in te reo with instrumentation falling away.

‘Protest Song’ reflects on an incident after a gig when a woman accostedthem saying “We need to do something”. In response Cloher sings ‘I don’t represent anyone/ I don’t even know myself…. On the drive home I looked inside my heart’. A song of epiphany. As is the entire album: a set of songs that keep revealing lyrical richness.

In The Wild, for instance, we hear ‘Leave the wild things where they are/ there are worlds you were never meant to see/put your camera down/ if you need to keep making things/ make love to the part that needs you to remember/ who you have always been’. Deep and provoking.  And then there is He Toka-Tu Moana, a gentle and delicate waiata, the only track entirely in te reo.

The album closes with I am Coming Home, a tour de force. In a self-revelatory tone suggestive of Joni Mitchell, the track begins with ‘Spent my whole life trying to find the parts that were missing/ What I achieved was all that defined me/ Never knowing what was behind me’. Following a repeated ‘I am going home’ the momentum builds towards the album’s culmination…spine-tingling karanga that rises above Cloher’s vocals.  The last time such a hauntingly memorable karanga appeared in a bilingual song was possibly Crowded House’s Together Alone. But here, given the power of whakapapa, it feels more deeply integrated and a direct upwelling from the writer’s experience.

This is a stunning album by an artist with a foot firmly on the ground on either side of the Tasman. Its cycle of songs of intimacy and place deserve to be widely heard here and ensure that Jen Cloher becomes better known in this, their maternal homeland.

Robin Kearns

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