Review Summary: Loveliness, understated
Herhums' latest album,
To Save Us All, is a gentle rainshower on a cool spring day. A moment or two of gauzy stillness and afternoons spent idly on the edge of pleasant dreams. Little in its silken drift suggests more than the bare trappings of folk, at least until nearly midway through the album, to the point that the album gently hints at a depth that is all too obviously
there, but which only breaks through the surface at patiently spaced moments, moments that walk a narrow line between lightweight breeziness and genuine grace.
It’s a transportive album that’s touched, colored by snatches of rainfall and birdsong, windchimes and gentle echoes of piano scales drifting in and out of the fingerpicked arpeggios and whispered harmonies that make up the album’s framework. It recalls Vashti Bunyan’s revival works in its sense of gentle intimacy, an intimacy that’s here made dreamlike by a cool dewfall of instrumental ambience and breathy whispers, a broader sonic palette that is applied as delicately as possible. With the gently layered production and gentle swell and trough of the dynamics, the moments where Nick Drake’s ghost or the spirit of Vashti’s blessing come rising out of the speakers, Herhums have grown a piece of music that very nearly comes to being a true work of ambient folk.
Of course it’s nearly impossible to offend when these dreamy, pastoral shades make up your palette. Keep all the wispy beauty of these little brushstrokes and love it for what it is, but there's sometimes a sense that they blend together like an Impressionist work, creating the strikingly true and coherent effect of light, but alsocreating an image that feels slightly indistinct. Like Ichiko Aoba's recent work, which resonates with poignant melodies that don’t always linger in the mind after the music has stopped,
To Save Us All might share a struggle to leave a lasting impact, beyond an immediate sense of loveliness. When those moments of memorability come, as on Odd Land, one of the few tracks that feel like a full-fledged song rather than a lovely little cutout vignette, the effect is arresting, and puts aside the fear that this album might be little more than a breezy piece of fluff.
Niggling doubts of memorability aside, the ambience and haziness never really detracts from the album's overall charm. Herhums has crafted a mesmerizing collection of songs that serve as a tranquil sanctuary in a chaotic world, and one that realizes what the soul of wit is, the album’s runtime ends up being to its benefit. Choosing their climaxes with a sense of understatement that never really ruptures the drifting bubble that is
To Save Us All, Herhums have made an album that is so subtly striking, and so dreamlike, that one wonders if they didn’t in fact imagine the whole thing.
