Avalon Stone Releases “Cliffhanger”
Clutching onto a doomed relationship until your fingernails start to crack is a feeling a lot us can all too easily recognize. But nobody can convey the sensation of dangling from a high precipice of the heart quite like Avalon Stone, the consistently astounding post-grunge heavy rocker who’s rendered just such a predicament in typically dizzying style on her new single, “Cliffhanger.”
Drawing a picture of imminent romantic freefall that’s equal parts despair and acrophobia, Stone casts herself in a position in which there’s simply nowhere to go—whether up or down.
You step toward me
I take another one back
Cant see the water below
But I hear the waves crash Broken by battle
Bruised to the bone
Will I end up on this bed of stone
Cliffhanger
Waiting for the fall
Do I let go or hang on Cliffhanger
Clinging to the wall
Didn’t know I’d been here so long
In a paradoxical approach to musical arrangement that’s become nearly synonymous with her genius, Stone has elected to express that deep unease in a way that’s anything but ambivalent. If you slowed down “Cliffhanger” a bit, its dramatic chord changes and minor-key melody might make it a classic torch song. Instead, she’s chosen the path of no compromise, keeping the song a hard-charging rocker that’s driven by the pummeling rhythms of drummer Tyler Shea and bassist Donovan McKinley and the string-skipping rifferama of guitarist Caleb Bourgeois. The key ingredient, of course, is Stone’s own trademark, Fiona-Apple-if-she-could-kick-your-ass voice, which elevates the track to the same wuthering heights she’s singing about. By the time the oxygen-infused chorus kicks in, you feel like you’re listening to the main-title number of a James Bond movie nobody’s gotten around to writing yet.
Next on her concert calendar is Oct. 18 in Sarnia and an Oct. 25 Halloween show at the world-famous El Mocambo club in downtown Toronto—site of a history-making 1977 engagement that proved pivotal in the rejuvenation of the Rolling Stones. Avalon Stone, of course, needs no shot in the arm at this thrilling point in her creative genesis. She may sing of cliffhangers, but the trajectory of her career is plain to see: onward and upward, into ever-friendlier skies. Why bother looking down?