(3/6/5) 028: Memorial - White Campion
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I’ve written the majority of these posts so far off-the-cuff, leaning into the daily nature of the posting to just share songs as they come and go, as they find me. That was mostly the plan for 3/6/5 all along, as I said at the beginning of this project last month.
I found today’s album a couple of weeks ago, when it was released earlier this month. I've already spent so much time within its walls that I’ve carved out a space for myself inside of it, found a way to bring it into mine world and spaces too. Even though it grabbed from the first few seconds of its opening track, I didn’t want to do write some impromptu reflection on just one song from it because I knew immediately it was one of those records. The kind of collection that for some odd reason we can never really define, burrows a little deeper, greets you a little differently.
It’s a feeling I think I’m always chasing, and I’m sure many of you too – that indeterminable hook that keeps us listening, keeps us seeking out songs we haven’t heard yet, sounds that might ever so softly nudge the course of our life in a slightly different direction than where it was heading.
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Memorial’s Redsetter LP begins in wildflower, amid White Campion, a mostly-perennial plant, which often lives for a number of years, growing again each spring in fields and hedges and roadside verges. It begins, too, in gentle acoustic strums and flickers of piano, a soft bed laid for the voices of Ollie Spalding and Jack Watts to continuously astound.
It’s prettiness is difficult to fathom, as is the fact that it stems from the UK, such is the rustic Texan glow of its delivery – though they did travel there and back again from their Brighton home during the album’s concoction. A warm embrace of vulnerability, 'White Campion', the song, is no less of a flower, one that leans toward the sun whether it sits perfectly in a field of green, or dust-spattered and grubby on the side of the road. The flower only knows one way to be, after all.
I can’t really remember the last time a song so quickly, so greatly moved me. Not just from the first play, but from the first flickers of it; a blush without warning. It reminded me then, as it does now with greater context, of the first time I heard Lomelda. 'White Campion' especially lingers with the same kind of wholehearted melancholy that Hannah Read wrings out of every short turn of phrase she songs.
“Shadows of the evening, the stretched out reminders, of all the words I wrote on my forearm; you don’t have to burn brighter” they sing at the song’s conclusion, the light slowly dimming, the flame almost gone. It’s so gently affecting it’s no wonder it’s the album’s introduction, such is the power of its persuasion.
Funnily enough (or perhaps, of course she does) Lomelda turns up a couple of songs later for a guest-appearance on ‘Guardian’ another of the album’s highlight-among-highlights, Hannah's voice as wonderful and singular as always, nestled in among Ollie's and Jack's.
Elsewhere on Redsetter, ‘Circle’ bristles and bends under the weight of its elegance, the pair’s voices again working in a push-and-pull that does what magic does: confound and enchant, enchant and confound. While 'Good Nature' is piano led and perhaps the album's saddest moment, the kind of slump you can hear wobble in a voice, prickle on the skin: "I always end up losing myself."
Then, just as White Campion eagerly pulls you into its opening scene, the bare-boned, simple ballad of ‘Warrener’ offers the album’s unvarnished goodbye; just one voice and one guitar, filling the space around it and beyond; through cracks in the floorboard, melding with the breeze that tickles the window. “Human life is weird sometimes,” it shares. “Human life is hard sometimes.”
It is, and it is. And never less so than when a couple of strangers, with a handful of instruments can sit and sing and start a ripple that carries on all the way to the bones and blood of someone they never even knew would hear it, just to say:
these songs are yours, also.
Time and time and time again.
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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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