Reviewed by Ian Phillips.
By Nick Mulvey, Fiction Records/Virgin Music Australia 2022.
Nick Mulvey is an English indie/folk singer/songwriter and New Mythology is the first music that I’ve heard from him.
New Mythology is a 12-track album with two bonus tracks, one acoustic and the other the radio edit, of the single Star Nation.
It’s a concept album about the interconnectivity of humanity and its natural environment.
Nick explains it by coining the word ‘interbeing’, which is “the symbiosis between family and friends, land and trees, soil and sky.
In Begin Again he sings; I am in the city, in the forest and the field.
The 12 songs on New Mythology recognise the peril we face from our heating planet but also they acknowledge our ability to learn from our mistakes and rediscover ancient ways of relating to our world.
We see it here in our embrace of the slow burns of indigenous firing of the landscape to generate regrowth and mitigate bushfires.
The enmeshing of human beings and the environment is to overturn hundreds of years of dominating and changing our environment.
It’s the acknowledgement that we can’t keep going on as we have done. It requires a change of mindset that places the environment as an equal partner in our future, not something to constantly subjugate and abuse.
While Nick has been grappling with these large concepts he has also been engaged in a journey of self-discovery brought about by the confluence of a series of important changes in his personal life.
He changed locations from his home in England to Spain and back home again, became a father, and of course navigated his way through the pandemic.
The two themes, facing up to the uncertain future that climate change is bringing, and plumbing the depths of his feelings, have found a home on this record.
It’s the interconnection of all things. Nick’s explanation is:
“For me this album is about showing up and not running away. From myself, from these times, from taking responsibility.”
