Review: Bertie Newman pieces together broken shards with ‘Precipice’ EP
Newman’s new EP is a brutal depiction of suicide and grief.
There’s an immediate and intense fragility oozing from “Razored Glass,” the bull-doze opener to Bertie Newman’s new EP. “There’s blood in her hand,” he weeps, letting his voice break into a million fragments. It primes the listener for the heart-shattering Precipice, a project that centers around his friend’s suicide and how his life forever changed in the blink of an eye. He decorates his words with a brittle, yet jagged, edge. It goes down smoothly, but there’s a deadly rattle that echoes into the furthest recesses of the EP.
“I still need you / I still love you,” Newman sighs with “Come Back Around,” a haunted whirling dervish that finds him letting all the air leave his lungs. Threads of guilt, regret, and grief twist together to create a magnificently mournful memorial to a dear friend. Precipice quietly seeps into the skin but bangs and clatters once it’s inside. “Signs of you pass, town by town,” his voice ebbs and flows in a cascade of tears, soaking his cheeks and flooding his life. “Six Months Later” is a rosy barb piercing the heart. Blood soaks his own hands, too, as he grapples with the past and his place in the present.
Where “Call Me Back” bruises the senses with its coarse sensibility, as he beckons to come “back to you,” “Decay” peels and cracks the outer casing of his heart. He finds himself stuck chest-deep in mud, and the EP is the only conduit out. Newman’s Precipice emerges like six tortured ghosts haunting his every waking moment. He can’t even find relief in his dreams; he only sees her. For now, he’ll exorcise the past the only way he knows how: his songwriting.
