Music Review: Hozier

Hozier is every rustic girl's dream man. Permanently wrapped in his denim jacket, he successfully pulls off the L.L.Bean-model-meets-starving-artist look. When he sings, it is impossible to not compare his low key charisma to Sex and the City’s Aidan.

Oh yeah, his music: it’s pretty good too.

Hozier, the Irish-born musician, finally released his first studio full-length album, the eponymous Hozier. It’s a thirteen track melange of wistful sentiment tinged with defiance and, sometimes, straight up angst. Take Me To Church, Hozier’s first EP released last year, set the bar high. It also set us up for a debut album that would be full of the same forceful blues as the title track “Take Me To Church” that propelled Hozier to fame.

Most people would describe Hozier’s musical roots in blues and gospel, and in interviews he’s talked candidly about his early childhood exposure to it. There’s certainly that baleful, melancholic thrust in Hozier’s music, the constant echo of a lamentation that the world’s complexity is just a shade too much for his beautiful head to wrap itself around. Yet, Hozier is full of songs that sound like they were written by three different musicians. Under normal circumstances, this might be confusing or noncommittal, but Hozier’s distinctive powerful and doleful voice is able to bring the album into a coherent whole.

Hozier’s real strength is that he infuses this blues-y, emotive aesthetic with beautiful lyricism, reminiscent of Bob Dylan or The Tallest Man on Earth. This earthy lyricism comes through on the album’s best, most nuanced tracks: “Take Me To Church,” “Work Song” and “Cherry Wine.” In “Take Me To Church,” Hozier manages to attack bigotry while delivering one of the year’s best written songs (if that isn’t sexy, then I don’t know what is). The theme of double-edged love and the fine line between passion and abuse are predominant threads throughout his soulful tracks. “Cherry Wine” makes clever allusions to the saccharine yet sanguine look of cherry wine; the song is as bittersweetly crafted as the abusive relationship Hozier croons about.

Meanwhile, other tracks, particularly “Sedated” and “Jackie and Wilson,” have a straight-up rock sensibility, though the daydreamy whimsy of “Jackie and Wilson” is reminiscent of Hozier’s more well known songs. In “Someone New,” he cleverly takes the chorus and turns it into a sound that rolls off the tongue; it’s a truly earworm-y lick that will get stuck in your head for days.

Then, there’s the third side of Hozier: a darker, more self-destructive one that peeps out on songs like “It Will Come Back” and occasionally in “Sedated” and in “In A Week.” In his usual lugubrious inquiries about love and life, I detect more than a note of despair. Maybe it’s the displacement felt by a prematurely old soul (in “Jackie and Wilson” he complains, “I need to be youthfully felt cause god I never felt young”) or the burden of having so many feelings.

In “From Eden,” he asks us: "Babe, there's something wretched about this / Something so precious about this / Oh what a sin / where to begin?" I begin by listening to Hozier. There’s something joyful about listening to Hozier’s melancholy. It’s a melancholy that reminds us of all of we have to be happy about.