Elizabeth’s debut solo album, “The Wonderful World Of Nature”, is everything. It. Is. Everything. She sings of desire, infatuation, and heartache with unnerving honesty and openness. The language Elizabeth uses is straight-forward and unembellished, and it’s exactly this which makes her songs so poetic and affecting.
The first time I heard Elizabeth sing “I want you in every way. You don’t treat me nicely and I’m scared I’m gonna stay,” on “I Want You,” I doubled over, both physically and emotionally. In 2018, the frontwoman of Australian rock outlet Totally Mild released Her, an album that brilliantly unpacks the bittersweet, socially convoluted journey of domesticity and the lack of a blueprint for it within the context of queerness.
Her debut solo album, The Wonderful World of Nature, is its crushingly honest divorce counterpart. In a world that’s lacking many queer divorce albums at all, to hear one as honest and mind-bogglingly raw as this is a transformative treasure everyone should experience.
The Wonderful World Of Nature plays like a 11-stage gauntlet of post-breakup emotional grief; the path to moving on isn’t a straight line and might never end. Song-to-song, and often verse to verse, the winding line of grief makes its presence felt. “If not with you, then with who?” Elizabeth nearly howls on “Beautiful Baby,” the gently rocking first track, which gives way to “Parties,” a song about how distracting yourself with partying leads you to wondering if your ex is out doing the same, which, in turn, makes you miss them more. “Death Toll” is a slow march about the ways a break-up can leave you devastated, but also finds Elizabeth lamenting, “I will never be the same happy” after saying “It’s over baby, there’s nothing more to say.” The next track, “I Want You,” has Elizabeth softly singing over a piano, “You don’t treat me nicely, and I’m scared I’m gonna stay,” capturing layers of self-loathing, lust, and regret in a single line. The Wonderful World isn’t a bible for how to get over a breakup, but it feels more honest than breakup albums usually are; it’s never just a “fuck you” and it’s never just an “I wish we were still together.” When two people collide, they break up in unpredictable, awful, restorative ways.
The Wonderful World of Nature released Universal Music Australia
The Fat Angel Sings 