Leyland Kirby: Sadly, The Future is No Longer What It Was
While James Kirby has never done "happy" per se, Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was finds the Stockport-hailing producer plumbing new depths of melancholy. Track titles like 'Not Even Nostalgia Is As Good As It Used To Be' and 'When Did Our Dreams And Futures Drift So Far Apart' leave you in no doubt as to grave mindset of our producer and protagonist.
Renouncing the hauntological sampling strategies of his acclaimed Caretaker project, this album is the sound of Kirby's heart laid bare. Stately chord progressions, aching piano melodies, and ever-present, wraith-like synth loops - all played by Kirby himself - make it one of his warmest and most accessible works to date, despite its intimidating three-disc scale.
Whereas The Caretaker records sounded quintessentially English (partly due to the sample sources), there's a decidedly European frisson to Sadly, a certain snow-hushed romanticism perhaps reflecting Kirby's recent relocation to Berlin. For some reason I found myself thinking of the Polish scenes from David Lynch's Inland Empire, and indeed Angelo Badalamenti - Lynch's favoured soundtrack composer - is an obvious but helpful reference-point for the sound of Sadly. It's not just that the two artists use similar sound palettes. In Kirby's music as in Badalamenti's, lightness and dark aren't separate entities but functions of each other: ominous drones give birth to heart-burstingly pretty melodies; upwards-rising, optimistic chords are destabilised by ghost notes of pure despair. In Kirby's world every cloud has a silver lining, but fuck me, are there a lot of clouds.
Sadly is a work which merits deep immersion, which is fortunate, because its sheer duration demands it. As with pretty much any triptych or trilogy ever, it's the middle act - in this case Disc 2 - that's most powerful. 'I've Hummed This To All The Girls I've Known', with its drifting pads and quivering theremin lead is almost unbearably poignant; so too the washed-out Harold Budd-isms of 'Not Even Nostalgia Is As Good As It Used To Be' and 'When Did Our Dreams And Futures Drift So Apart''s creeping ambient jazz. Disc 3 - Memories Live Longer Than Dreams - is less taut, but nonetheless it brings the journey to an amply satisfactory denouement, the GAS-like crunch and swirl of 'A Longing To Be Absorbed...' giving way to ecstatic closer 'And At Dawn Armed With Glowing Patience, We Will Enter The Cities of Glory (Stripped)', the title reminding us that despite all his archiving of pain, Kirby hasn't lost his sense of humour.
Sadly The Future Is No Longer What It Was is a magnificently sustained achievement, and - to date - James Kirby's most human and anguished work. It's an unfashionably immense album about an immense and unfashionable subject: loss, and time's stubborn failure to redeem it. Compulsory listening, then, but perhaps best avoided by the recently dumped.
——Peter Strathairn
Renouncing the hauntological sampling strategies of his acclaimed Caretaker project, this album is the sound of Kirby's heart laid bare. Stately chord progressions, aching piano melodies, and ever-present, wraith-like synth loops - all played by Kirby himself - make it one of his warmest and most accessible works to date, despite its intimidating three-disc scale.
Whereas The Caretaker records sounded quintessentially English (partly due to the sample sources), there's a decidedly European frisson to Sadly, a certain snow-hushed romanticism perhaps reflecting Kirby's recent relocation to Berlin. For some reason I found myself thinking of the Polish scenes from David Lynch's Inland Empire, and indeed Angelo Badalamenti - Lynch's favoured soundtrack composer - is an obvious but helpful reference-point for the sound of Sadly. It's not just that the two artists use similar sound palettes. In Kirby's music as in Badalamenti's, lightness and dark aren't separate entities but functions of each other: ominous drones give birth to heart-burstingly pretty melodies; upwards-rising, optimistic chords are destabilised by ghost notes of pure despair. In Kirby's world every cloud has a silver lining, but fuck me, are there a lot of clouds.
Sadly is a work which merits deep immersion, which is fortunate, because its sheer duration demands it. As with pretty much any triptych or trilogy ever, it's the middle act - in this case Disc 2 - that's most powerful. 'I've Hummed This To All The Girls I've Known', with its drifting pads and quivering theremin lead is almost unbearably poignant; so too the washed-out Harold Budd-isms of 'Not Even Nostalgia Is As Good As It Used To Be' and 'When Did Our Dreams And Futures Drift So Apart''s creeping ambient jazz. Disc 3 - Memories Live Longer Than Dreams - is less taut, but nonetheless it brings the journey to an amply satisfactory denouement, the GAS-like crunch and swirl of 'A Longing To Be Absorbed...' giving way to ecstatic closer 'And At Dawn Armed With Glowing Patience, We Will Enter The Cities of Glory (Stripped)', the title reminding us that despite all his archiving of pain, Kirby hasn't lost his sense of humour.
Sadly The Future Is No Longer What It Was is a magnificently sustained achievement, and - to date - James Kirby's most human and anguished work. It's an unfashionably immense album about an immense and unfashionable subject: loss, and time's stubborn failure to redeem it. Compulsory listening, then, but perhaps best avoided by the recently dumped.
——Peter Strathairn
- 表演者: Leyland Kirby
- 发行时间: 2009-10-27
- 流派: 流行
- 出版者: History Always Favou
- 专辑类型: Box set