032: Gem Club - Tend
Save for a one-off track released in 2021, it's now a decade and more since Gem Club released their last album, the sprawling and bruised masterpiece In Roses - which gave us one of the most moving song-and-video pairings I've ever experienced. It's also a full thirteen years since we first covered them on GoldFlakePaint, during the release of their less sprawling but equally beautiful LP, Breakers.
To hear Gem Club's music just once is to etch it into your bones. So, while the disappearance of Christopher Barnes' project left a significant and singular kind of emptiness, such is the power of the music he writes that it's retained its quiet magnitude throughout his time away, constantly bubbling back to the surface when the night, the season, reminds you of it.
All of which is to say that when Gem Club teased a return this week, and swiftly followed it up with the release of new song 'Tend' today, it left an almost giddy feeling of both newness but also wistful nostalgia; like driving past a childhood home and seeing someone else inside the walls and windows.
In all of the ways we fell so hard for Gem Club's previous music, 'Tend' is suitably transfixing. Barnes' breathy falsetto remains both beautiful and blemished, carrying the kind of hurt it takes to know you're alive. Able, as ever, to carry such overwhelming emotion while never even tickling with the idea of anything remotely approaching tweeness, and never getting quite too heavy to collapse in on itself.
Formed around tender piano, carried by a breeze of strings, there's little information as to whether this is another one-off reminder of Gem Club's unique abilities or the first line of a whole new chapter, and so we hope for the latter while simply being grateful that they're even here at all. Such is life.
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three / six / five is a daily music-sharing project from gold flake paint; read more about the idea here
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