Labels: Time Travel Opportunities
Review by: Captain Fidanza
From the very first moment, this album sounds like something made for the right reasons.
Somewhere in amongst the beautifully sparse packaging exists the line, “inspired by the city of Derby at night” and in every moment, from first to last, can be heard the sound of a provincial life well lived. “Lots of shortcuts and detours” explain the notes, things that only you and I know, things that only we know because we live here and we always have. We were born here, we grew up here and we live here still; not because we’ve never found a reason to leave, but because unlike so many others who only return at Christmas to regale us with tales of brighter and louder places elsewhere, we’ve never sought a reason to.
There is comfort and warmth here, but no safety or security. We know that the glow which surrounds us is fleeting and likely to die with the first glowing of the street lights. We walked these streets many years ago on our way to the only proper nightclub in town and tonight, many years later, we’re walking them still, except now we’re on the way home from the off-license with a half bottle of rum in our overcoat pocket and as we pass a house and notice “someone getting undressed and turning the lights down low,” we think of all those moments which never came.
The author of this work appears to be not only a very talented multi-instrumentalist, but also something of a multi-genrelist, capable of shifting effortlessly between the shapes necessary for intimate folk, post-rock and gentle, ticking ambience. Even more unusually, this album of varied style and influence is equally impressive in all it’s forms, with the larger whole held together through a strongly unifying aesthetic. This is an album made by someone who sounds as though he stood up to live for some considerable time before he decided to sit down to write.
There are distant echoes of Will Oldham here and in the incredible, accapella “houses, empty as holes” Fleet Foxes are not far away, but whereas both of these artists occupy themselves with people and worlds none of us are ever likely to encounter, the music here resonates with that which once may have been familiar but now for so many reasons exists only in the world of memory. Not because it has ceased to exist, but because we have simply forgotten how important it once was to us and have filled the hole it left in our lives with things to which we now, foolishly ascribe a greater importance.
The plaintive, final song on the album, a piece of music which would surely be extinguished if someone were to suddenly open a door, has a voice “imagining the view, from behind the wheel of midnight traffic” a line which beautifully comprises almost every emotion evoked by this music to someone, such as myself, who grew up in a place to which they now so rarely return. I have been in that car, stuck in that traffic jam on the outskirts of that city, looking in the rearview mirror for the person I used to be. You have too probably.
People who didn’t grow up somewhere small and unregarded will probably refer to much of what’s contained here as “sparkling” and that it might be, but what they wont tell you, because they wont understand, is that what’s sparkling is the light from the sign outside a late-night garage, reflected in a puddle made up of rainwater and piss. A slight breeze blows across the puddle and ripples the surface sending shards of light shooting off into the darkness, but that doesn’t bother us very much because we’re off home to sit down next to the electric fire and talk amongst ourselves about what we’re going to do tomorrow.
If you don’t seek this music out, then you’re not from around here and we don’t want to know you.