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.
It’s all in a day’s work for this preternaturally gifted native of Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, who at age 10 attended a School of Rock camp and was performing professionally within the year. Having passed up a university education to pursue a full-time career in music, she’s spent the ensuing near-decade playing on more than 300 stages in Ontario and the U.S., in everything from bar gigs to festival appearances that have attracted crowds of 15,000 and up.
An even bigger audience latched onto the first singles from her debut album, Chained – a bracingly mature and unflinching exploration of inner darkness and hoped-for liberation that will be fully released this winter. Those qualities have been in abundance on previous singles like “Forget You,” a deceptively defiant-sounding portrait of a toxic relationship that’s logged more than 200,000 streams worldwide; “Harder,” a mournful acknowledgment of the crippling effects of depression; and “Shaking Me Up,” which portrayed two people amplifying each other’s worst traits: uncontrollable anger and profound sadness.
Listen on Spotify here: open.spotify.com/track/7EIQxU4uTXaPWvLRDlKb1E
Confronting difficult emotions is a challenge Stone has consistently refused to shrink from. She responded to the widespread disorientation and alienation of the 2020 pandemic by hosting a series of socially distanced outdoor concerts that became a popular livestream. That in turn gave her the idea for Music for Mental Health Canada, a nonprofit that raises money through events like Rock the Halls, a platform for local musicians to perform originals and custom arrangements of holiday songs. Watch for this year’s dates.
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?
