I’m not overly familiar with Le Days’ output, but I’m really liking the stark majestics Daniel Hedin is conjuring up on We Are Nowhere, a double album of emotional outpourings buried in roomy reflection and shoaling silver. As you all know, I love a bit of musical introspection, and this provides a plentiful platter to all that is broken or bent out of shape.
The dark dirge of opener “23617” sets the tone, its architecture malevolently mauling your senses in soft undulating organ slants and vocal repetition. The cathartic surrender that is “Believe In Me” vividly lassoing you back and forth like a breeze-caught branch, its acoustic strum and counter-curl brittlely scaffolding those lost latitudes with sparrow-footed fretwork and clapped accompaniment, the syrupy slip of mouth organ a distant traffic jam caught in thick fog.
That minimally furnished vocal has real star quality, an ungarnished gravitas that spectres a Doctor Came At Dawn-era Smog or a down-turned Neil Young, but remains more concentrated, unflinchingly sincere. The album throws you a disturbed bone in the shape of “Burn Them All”, a salted trauma within a sinister rub of cello, all vengeful vortex and scathing voice existentially sizzling the speakers. We Are Nowhere is a well-crafted closed-curtain experience, sticky and fevered, a sense of defeat drifting into a spidery sense of exhaustion. Its sombre serrations warm and connecting, poetically arrowing what it means to be “human”. Each track is seemingly haunted by obsessive thoughts that hungrily circle the reverberation, sometimes favouring abstracted yodels or howls when words fail to articulate the truth it seeks.A hangover of exquisite hues that gives off plenty of shifting perspectives. The surprise sugar rush of electro that is “I Say Escape” is a diaristic soliloquy on a shopping mall’s escalator; or the clattering improv chaos of “Erase Me” that lets things go so brilliantly. The nicotined patina of vulnerability is prism-fed, leaving the closing aperture of the title track to a Salvador Dalí-esque sweet sigh of resignation. A sense that the party’s over, leaving you to relive your memories on those skeletal piano lines, a flickering internal newsreel dribbling back into the comforting darkness.
Well recommended.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
