Condensedindents – She, Sir
Back in the halcyon days of the blog, I fell all over myself with love for a song by She, Sir. It’s now been the better part of a decade since I wrote that post, but they have finally come out with a full-length album. And I’m happy to tell you that it was well worth all that wait.
Go Guitars draws in equal parts from the traditions of shoegaze and indie pop, and is jam-packed with songs that hit that perfect sweet spot previously found in your JAMCs, your Trembling Blue Stars, your Real Estates, your Felts, your Echoes and maybe even some Bunnymen.
These are shimmery pop songs filled with reverb, immediately present and yet still elusive, mysterious. They evoke a sense of distance – with sonic wells that suggest echoes returning from miles deep – while still surrounding you with sheets of gauzy silk. You hear impressions, possibilities, intense emotions – but always through a filter. You are catching glimpses into alternate possibilities. Beautiful, impossible worlds filled with singing clouds and geometries that fold back on themselves.
“Doubtless the notes which we hear at such moments tend, according to their pitch and volume, to spread out before our eyes over surfaces of varying dimensions, to trade arabesques, to give us the sensation of breadth or tenuity, stability or caprice. But the notes themselves have vanished before these sensations have developed sufficiently to escape submersion under those which the succeeding or even simultaneous notes have already begun to awaken in us. And this impression would continue to envelop in its liquidity, its ceaseless overlapping, the motifs which from time to time emerge, barely discernible, to plunge again and disappear and drown, recognized only by the particular kind of pleasure which they instil, impossible to describe, to recollect, to name, ineffable — did not our memory, like a labourer who toils at the laying down of firm foundations beneath the tumult of the waves, by fashioning for us facsimiles of those fugitive phrases, enable us to compare and to contrast them with those that follow.”
–Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way