Thursday 26 February 2015

The White Birch – The Weight of Spring

The White Birch is time slowed down, moments drawn out, emotional burdens given their space to be felt. In the ten years since Come Up For Air, Ola Flottum has lost his mother, fathered two children, and bought a house in Oslo, where he's set up a basement studio. You can feel it. Despite the air and light in the arrangements of these slow, sad songs, there's the weight of earth around them, the slow transformation of leaves into soil, the movement of feelings from felt sensations into memories.

The Weight of Spring is so uniform in its mood, so consistently poised, it's almost ambient music, tinting the room with melancholy. It glows and thrums with an internal rhythm that allows it to unfold naturally without the desperate need to grab your attention. If you're not moved by this music, you're not listening, not really – you're waiting to be impressed. Key to this is Flottum's voice, a strange, wavering, deflated instrument, and once you acclimatise to its timbre, it has its own unique beauty.

Most of these anti-gravity ballads are sparse and beatless, traced out lovingly on piano and strings. Whenever rhythms are introduced (such as on 'New York' 'Lamentation', 'Lantern' and 'Spring') it feels like the clouds parting, like feeling your heartbeat again after being slumped listless on the couch. It gets the blood flowing, lifts the mood, breaks the daze. The album also employs striking textural shifts to break the narcoleptic fog, such as the second half of 'Lantern' and 'Mother'. These moments need the context of their neighbouring songs to create their dramatic effect, which lends the album a wonderfully unified atmosphere.

I still feel like I'm coming to terms with the subtle shifts this album stirs within me. It needs more time to absorb. It needs more space to breathe it all in. It's truly beautiful.


Thursday 12 February 2015

Lazy Salon – 'Halo Hand' / 'DAM'

Sometimes a promo email grabs me immediately with a short description. In the case of Lazy Salon, all it took was "the stonier side of Yo La Tengo" to reel me in. And dammit, this new two-track, eighteen-minute release by Sean Byrne (ex-Twin Atlas, Mazarin, Azusa Plane, Photon Band, Lenola, BC Camplight) sounds exactly like the stonier side of YLT. Maybe a bit more layered and reverb-drenched, but definitely in the YLT lounge room, kicking back. (He's called himself Lazy Salon, just to drive the point home.) This is a very good thing. Oh wait, there's more from Sean: "new directions in layered hypnotic pop jammers". Dammit, this guy is good. Not only does he create awesome music, he can succinctly describe it in order to really draw people in. (Well, me at least.)

'Halo Hand' starts off as though you've just walked in on Ira, Georgia and James rehearsing 'I Heard You Looking'. It sounds like one of those staircase melody illusion things, as if the music is constantly ascending, spiralling upwards into the clouds. 'DAM' pulls off the same trick, but with a sleight-of-hand down-tempo intro before we're into prime YLT territory again, percussive details flitting around as distorted guitar leads shoot off like fireworks. Real head-out-the-car-window-while-summer-driving stuff. Beatific.

In addition to these two fantastic new songs, there are three more on the Lazy Salon website from last year, just sitting there for free download. (Hint: download them too, they're great.) Sometimes this music-via-the-internet thing is just too easy: someone living in New Jersey cranks out superb instrumental jams and uploads them to the internet; someone living in Melbourne hears about said instrumental jams via email, downloads them and blisses out. You know what to do.

Monday 9 February 2015

Sam Atkin – Gently, Quietly

I like music that is simultaneously big and small. Both vast and intimate. Large enough to lose yourself in but human-sized, too. Sam Atkin's Gently, Quietly is such music.

It's skewed in such a way that my ears discern some sense of perspective, a feeling of momentum, without being able to predict where it's going to end up. I'm ushered along by streaming synths, vague rhythms like heartbeats, droning half-melodies and twinkling piano lines that break my heart. I follow where it leads because it's strange and beautiful.

I approach this music feeling immediately at home, though I don't know if I've heard anything exactly like it. Too uneasy and melancholy for 'New Age', too clean and radiant to be 'lo-fi', too lovingly mapped out and oddly accessible to be 'experimental'.

The best way to put it is that I can hear Atkin making the music while it's playing, right there within the music, responding to what's just happened, fiddling with filters or cooing into a pitchshifter. During the second half of 'Grove/Grown' he decides to pick up an acoustic guitar and strum a few open-ended chords and it sounds new, for fuck's sake. When was the last time anyone did that with an acoustic guitar? He even manages to use field recordings of flowing water and birdsong without upsetting the applecart. It all feels just right to me, without being predictable or cheesy.

Music this understated yet so deeply affecting is a rare thing. Go and listen and download over at Bandcamp.

Monday 2 February 2015

Lower Dens – 'To Die in L.A.'



If I didn't know Beach House producer Chris Coady had a hand in Lower Dens' forthcoming third album Escape From Evil, I probably could've guessed from listening to their new single 'To Die in L.A.' It sounds so much like Beach House it's almost a parody. As gorgeous as Beach House's music may be, it's never really grabbed me. I mean, I can appreciate the husky desolation in Legrand's voice, the artisan's touch in the arrangement of their dreamy music, but I rarely go back for more. Lower Dens, on the other hand – I can't count the number of times I've played Twin Hand Movement and Nootropics.

On 'To Die in L.A.', the move into Beach House territory is, I'm hoping, just to tease out the highlights in Lower Dens' sound. This is the poppiest song off the new album, surely? It's a single it's supposed to grab people. Vocals front and centre! Bright keyboard arpeggio! Chiming Strat! Brisk tempo! I can already picture sensitive twenty-somethings in cardigans grooving self-consciously around an indie disco... As usual, though, when I start paying attention to what Jana Hunter is singing, the song takes on a slightly different hue: "I wish I could count on you to be mine / But here I'm not crying / I'm just glad to be alive".

For now, I'm cynical about their new direction on the basis of this single. Hopefully the musical momentum of Lower Dens 3.0 translates into something irresistible over the course of Escape From Evil, which comes out on Ribbon Music on 30th March – just in time for my 38th birthday. Thanks, Lower Dens.