Pure vocal passion and talent comes through Earia Music Project’s latest ballad ‘The Weight’. A sparse and spacious piano and voice duet about the atrocities being committed in the Gaza Strip, the piece holds weight and feeling to mirror the scale of collective pain it attempts to describe.
Earia Music Project is a musical duo based in Vancouver, Canada, and ‘The Weight’ is their latest single, written by their percussionist Sal Mattar, who is a Palestinian-Canadian, with a heavy heart, over the devastation that is taking place in Gaza. With a video made of clips and TikToks of the destruction the Palestinians live through each day, ‘The Weight’ is a stirring tribute to our collective inability to stop injustice, a frustration that is perfectly captured in Matthew Landry’s haunting vocal part.
Powerful and provocative, the song’s grand piano and melancholic chords are only a minor backdrop to Landry’s gigantic, agonized blues wails and the descriptive words that they wail. Greatly dynamic too, the song starts gently enough and gradually raises its stakes until the explosive crescendo kicks in, showcasing immense singing talent from Landry, displayed in the rawness of the take and in his capable range and control.
All in all, ‘The Weight’ is simple and noble. A song that isn’t here to say too many things because there aren’t many things to be said about the topic. It is a shared pain and a collective trauma that is continually unfolding. Earia Music Project are brutally honest in their delivery, and as a result, ‘The Weight’ is an easy song to resonate with.