Quirkily beautiful, surreal songs of displacement, love, heartbreak and bewilderment, change and feeling in limbo, by the Stockholm-based British ex-pat, Rhys Edwards, also known for the project Ulrika Spacek. It’s an album about life in transition and artist-in-exile, inspired by two key periods of his life – first moving from London in pursuit of a relationship, the second between homes in Stockholm as that decade-long relationship then suddenly dissolved, with diffusion, dissolution and reconstitution as recurring themes. Edwards quotes Charles Baudelaire (1869) to give a flavour of what to expect on the album: “But into my miserable brain, always concerned with looking for noon at two o’clock.” Other influences include Leonard Cohen and Mercury Rev. But this is not all misery, as much it is fascinating wooziness and offbeat beauty. As well as off-kilter, oddball lyricism (“I lost my foot on final stair, tumbled back to where I came, the hallway sleeps another kväll, on andra våningen is where brighter spells and times of trouble, entwine, then hide, then end”) feelings of being in limbo are also present in the music, often led by piano with unusual melodies, stop-start syncopations, stirring guitar chord changes, wistful infusions of brass and orchestral strings and layered vocal harmonies. Many highlights include the theremin-flavoured opener Heavy Is The Head, the slower, surreal Darkness At Noon, the title track, the strangely catchy A Rudderless Ship, all the way to superb, melancholic euphoria of R U A Literal Child? Fascinatingly strange, absorbing, experimental, space-out but also highly inventive. Out on Tough Love Recordings.
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