Make Way for Love

Williams’ emotive baritone, as ever, commands center stage, but it’s the album’s experimental elements (the Suicide-ish drum machine on “Party Boy,” the strange synth accompaniments throughout) and subtle psychedelia (as on the spellbinding “Can I Call You”) that push Williams’ sound to a more interesting and promising place.

He brings to mind Roy Orbison or Richard Hawley, but then on songs such as Beautiful Dress and The Fire of Love Williams has a magnificent, fluttering, gender-fluid falsetto that recalls Anohni or Perfume Genius.

It’s a bold, eclectic and audacious approach to the bulging catalog of breakup ruminations; one that emerges from the crowded field and shows Marlon Williams’ talents are just beginning to blossom.

It’s obvious where Marlon Williams’s influences lie but he expertly melds his roots with elements of chamber pop and ‘50s heartbreak amid a sea of textures. Make Way For Love is nuanced, subtle and evocative.

Whereas his debut self-titled album was a perfectly serviceable slice of alt-country, it wasn’t really distinctive enough to stand ahead of the pack. That’s all changed with Make Way For Love which, at times, contains some of the heartbreakingly beautiful songs you’ll hear all year.

Heartache is likely the most mined substance in all of pop music, but Williams applies such panache to the material that it's hard not to get wrapped up in all of the delicious melodrama.

Make Way For Love is a brooding and soulful offering from an artist keen to burst expectations. [Apr 2018, p.116]

This is a raw and acutely personal document. [Mar 2018, p.93]

Thankfully, Williams' effort to emulate that bygone sound is too sophisticated and idiosyncratic to be mere pastiche. [Mar 2018, p.35]

His velvet-rich voice is one that’s part lounge smoothie, one part vintage crooner, and one part vampiric Roy Orbison filled to the brim with drama and inherent romance. This ensures that Make Way For Love is more than an album full of weepy torch-songs, but an ode to all the feelings and phases that are the makings of a relationship’s end.

Make Way for Love is the soundtrack to a longing gaze across a mostly empty, darkly lit bar in which two lonely strangers find someone to spend the night with. It's a meditation on love--and perhaps, at times, simply on companionship.

In 2018 few singers could convincingly build a career as the next great crooner and William’s gambit to do that sometimes sacrifices the effectiveness of the songs, especially on those that serve his voice over craft. But when songwriting matches the talent of his voice the songs coalesce, and the results are spectacular.