Press releases tend to vanish once placed into my tender care. It’s not that I don’t bother to read them, or even, at times appreciate them, it’s just that they tend to disappear without leaving a trace or bidding as much as a fond farewell. Perhaps that’s a good thing. It’s good to come to things from a fresh perspective, to not be manipulated however subconsciously by being told that A are influenced by D, G, X and sound like K and Y and so forth.
This time though, the press release from Song, By Toad Records heralding the release of Trips And Falls album is sitting in front of me. Like the rather splendid and curious album it arrived with, it gives little or nothing away. The aura of vagueness is both charmingly oblique and beguiling, opening with a single line of description that is both terse and to the point and pinpoint accurate, simply stating: “Gentle and spooky guitar pop, alternately sadly sweet and disturbingly arrhythmic.”
From the opening song, ‘How Do You Do…’ right through to the album closer ‘Damaged Goods’, He Was Such A Quiet Boy lives up to this description and so much more. ‘How Do You Do…’ initially sounds glacial and impenetrable but it’s a seriously infectious song. It continually morphs all over the place making it an awkward devil to pin down. The sound is otherworldly and awkward with eerie guitars and a fluid percussive feel snaking down some strange avenues and footpaths.
‘We Were Like Strangers Today’ is a just as awkward and sweet. It all kicks off with a nagging guitar line, thunderous drums and a xylophone, building up and dropping off then increasing in momentum and velocity. It’s a disconcerting, destabilising but thrilling experience with coolly bittersweet interplay between the male and female singers. At times the song is subdued and spacey, at other points it’s frantic and furious, buzzing around like a swarm of seriously irritated bees before crashing into an ominous, moody climax.
‘And In Real Life He Wears Corduroy Pants’ is, well, to put it simply, gorgeously epic with its sweeping strings and rich vocal augmented by a choir of angelic, almost disembodied keyboards and voices. The middle section drops to just some muted electronics with Jacob Romero’s voice to the fore as he sings of feelings of connection and disconnection:
Another city down
And another on the horizon
But you’ve been here before
You’ve always been so charming
And they’ll always welcome you with open arms
And open minds and open doors.
In the same section the tone becomes less optimistic:
You could give in
But you never will
So elusive and caring
You keep them company in silence
Oh and how they don’t like that silence.
It’s a warm, strange, beautiful song, full of minute details yet all encompassing in its scope.
‘Breaking Up With My Mormon Missionaries’ draws you in with its nervy fractured sound, switching in tempo and focus, moving seamlessly between the male and female vocals, distorted electronics, honeyed strings and held together by a breathtaking and bruising rhythm section. It has a hypnotic mood to it, drawing you intimately in to it’s sense of drama. ‘You Should Really Get Yours’ has a strange, wonky sound. A de-tuned guitar, snatches of music box melodies and a looping, meandering rhythm giving it a discordant unsettling feel tempered by flashes of prettiness.
‘Prelude To A Shark Attack’ (how I love those song titles) has a gorgeous, gentle beginning, initially just guitar, cello and dueting voices. It’s a lovely song, delicate in places with its cool, sensuous textures of sounds rising and falling. The female singer strikes a note of optimism while Romero sounds full of doubt and fear, torn between running away and settling down in couplets such as ‘I see hard times ahead / I never really see that happy ending’ before the voices merge together in a delightful manner as both protagonists shift their positions to come full circle on their original stances. ‘Memoirs Of A Martyr’ has a dreamy atmospheric feel. Initially drifting along in a murky groove but full of tiny, seismic shifts in mood until it develops an intense feeling and sound, at times gentle, at others ferocious but always elegant and enchanting.
The penultimate song ‘Thanks For Sharing’ begins with a percussive electronic pulse and intertwined vocals before shifting to a warmer, fuller sound with guitar and strings. It’s a sweet, odd song with an uplifting ending topped off by a devastatingly effective a cappella female vocal. ‘Damaged Goods’ is an evocative, sparse slow song for the main part, lifted in passages by the addition of strings. With its muted, underwater guitar sound and Romero’s vocal at its most world weary and reflective as he sings ‘It doesn’t really matter / You weren’t speaking to me anyway’. As album closers go it’s pretty downbeat but poised and elegiac and eerily beautiful.
He Was Such A Quiet Boy is an intriguing and charming record. Initially, it sounded a little cold and awkward but each listen reveals more and more of its not inconsiderable charms and delights. A largely restless record, shifting between moods and time changes, it’s always restless and reluctant to settle into a groove or set pattern for too long. Trips And Falls draw upon an experimental tradition of post-rock guitar music but temper it and infuse it with some wonderful ideas and utterly brilliant song writing of their own to produce a fantastic, strange and enthralling record that is both slanted and enchanted.
