The Singles Bar: X. ARI reaches her ‘Break-Point’

Welcome to The Singles Bar, a review series focused on new single and song releases.

The stigma surrounding mental health follows us like a dark storm cloud. And it’s not one of those doltish sketches you’d find in such comic strips as Li’l Abner. As much as severe mental illness has often been the butt of jokes through popular culture (just look at Eeyore in the plushy Winnie-the-Pooh storybooks), we are living in an age of enlightenment, a moment in time when walls are crumbling and we’re learning what true compassion means. Daniella Watters, known onstage as X. ARI, conjures up a magical potion with her new single “Break-Point,” a genre-leaping expedition through her own psychological snap. “I’m not too good with surprises / You put her first, got me fighting,” she quakes in place, situating a relationship’s charcoal as stoking the fire to her own decay.

“I needed you / But you wanted them,” she later spits, emptying a vial of bile. She exorcises her demons in song, a much-blessed ritual to medicate and regain her sanity. Watters’ voice trembles between hushed tones that still penetrate the skin and bruised, purple-hewed caterwauling, as she rips the veil off her face and casts it into a whirling blackhole. Grungy percussion and guitars scratch at the bones, hollowing out her mind and spirit as a rusted shovel to a gravesite, but through surviving such ghastly body lashes, she recovers right in the knick of time into and is reborn into pastel liberation. Out of Toronto, Watters harvests metallic synthetics with cotton-candy-like instruments, mostly piano, for en endorphin-riddled treat.

“Break-Point,” which quickly ascends into the heavens as a gospel hymn, doesn’t side-step illustrating the exact dreadfulness of her mental capacity. “[This song] describes the moments right before I broke down late 2016. Having a mental health breakdown doesn’t just happen overnight. There’s a build up and a splitting point where you crack, and you’re not really yourself anymore,” explains Watters, who channels her grisly pain into a colossal chant of redemption. “Should have known better,” she pokes herself before a spine-tingling cry escapes her lungs. It’s a freeing, instinctual performance to remind the world of the all-devouring journey of mental health, also serving as an anecdote to further dismantle misconceptions.

Watters sets the record straight in a visceral, vibrant display. And we just might change hearts and minds after all.

Listen below:

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