My Review: One Little Atlas - Wayfarer

One Little Atlas - Wayfarer

A sonic scarf rises up from Manchester to take a stroll through the heart of male sensibilities, restoring light that has been lacking for too long in the northern English city. The delicacy, the horizons traversed and the mode make this work a romantic sunflower well equipped to withstand wear and tear. Two creators who, ten years on, return to unsettle with an enchanting treatise of beauty, whispers, rumbles taken by the hand and made to surrender. Kevan Hardman (owner of a stratospheric, bombastic timbre and possessing a vibrant propensity for caressing the pentagram on which his vocal chords rest) and Dean Jones (electronic wizard and messenger of complicated melodic textures made comprehensible and consequently absolutely capable of seizing the senses), are the main contributors to this album, assisted, perfectly, by the Up North Orchestra and Heather Macleod, Helena Francesca, Rosie Brownhill, Tim Davies and the backing vocals of Rose Feaver, Lynn Shuttleworth, Siobhan Donnelly and Obie & Kitt. With an impetus that approaches the mode of classical music, but using the modern means of the gentlest and most rarefied electronics, the tracks bring out with continuous vibration the certainty that an artistic expression can exist in our time that gathers moonbeams, peace, contemplation and discipline in bringing chaos to transform itself into a dew that refreshes the listener. 

And there appear whispers and changes in the textures that take it beyond the song form, with expansions and experimentation so similar to progressive, but without having the style. Here we visit the depth of the sound and its gathering of slow, kaleidoscopic pinwheels in the musical rainbow that uses all the notes to lighten the breath and the eyes. With Post-Rock attitudes but in moderate parry and the use of stratagems in keeping with the New-Age, the two take the responsibility of being whispers and catapult themselves into the subtlest orchestration, almost as if they did not want to disturb and intended to give us the opportunity of a cognitive experience capable of underlining the distance between the world they created and our own. Therefore, a deep falling in love becomes inevitable and not a lightning strike: no artificial seduction to attract the stupid, but a depth that is born and develops with the master hand of slowness. They scour folk territories with gracefulness, they penetrate dream pop with deep respect (without copying, but presenting remarkable novelties), they enter the British tradition with excellent revisiting quality, streamlining the ambient matrix that generously shows its boundaries and branches. The ethereal aspect is lightened by the constant sacredness that one finds when listening to it from other composers: here is a new aspect that rides on the structure of the two Mancunian outliers, who decide to discard the possibility of an exaggerated moral and philosophical commitment, building instead a garden always prone to freshness, with flowers that shine without ceasing. These compositions are nothing more than bubbles of hope that cling to the dream, while also releasing a real capacity for innovation, sowing light but powerful bricks to keep our minds wrapped up and protected. The keyboards, when they paint the confetti of notes, manage to make us smile, and then touch our emotional chords in a resounding alternation, destabilising, combing disbelief. 

The voice is a miracle educated in the atonement of sins, a kangaroo leap beyond the universe, a soft calamity, perfectly blunted and able to make the eyes and thoughts dreamy. Remarkable is the work of the rhythmic aspect, which, although in the hands of a drum machine, manages to make us perceive humanity, talent and power, without ever overpowering the delicate harmonisations. When you hear the light touches of the piano, you sense how classical music is present to whisper, inspire, point the way, without taking over, in a marriage of sighs and alchemy that is truly remarkable.
They have courage, these two angels with golden feathers: they put on the market a work heedless of fashions, of the habit of packaging something convenient and hasty, demonstrating what art should be, namely a generous exercise without the desire for reception, eliminating usufruct, nourishing instead continuous emotions...

Eleven episodes that flow impeccably. 

The opening Ascend (a synthetic pill in the odour of orchestral sanctity and with hidden trip-hop petals), opens the amazement, then the duo enters a meadow with the seductive Lyn, Devotion arrives and we understand how everything is rising, like a spirit in the act of its formation.
 Between post-rock and dream pop the emblematic Roads throws us into a track full of flowers and the emotion sticks to bodies and minds.

When Holo arrives you are clouds in the wind, Kevan and Helena Francesca's voices are dancing ecstasy on a sound film whispering smiles and the shimmer of stars.

Of Love reminds us of the importance of Vini Reilly (The Durutti Column), adding an essential and spectacular electronic mood to the splendidly scratchy guitar.

The album's title song (Wayfarer) is the aurora borealis narrated through celestial notes, in a peal of both sound and emotion: when dreams become matter they have this liturgical mode...
The surprises and novelties continue: Realise is a journey into the waves, as if anaesthetised only to be reinvigorated by a mysterious energy that Kevan's vocal expression manages to translate. New-age finds a perfect contact with world-music and trip-hop and everything becomes a golden cloak. Ceremony is a sudden jolt: the rhythm, the base, its development, the metrics of the singing are embraced poems, perfectly able to give confidence to the modernity that the electronic part offers.

Classical music was mentioned, and with Twilight its charm is transported to the present day, like a feather flying like a turtle: from its slowness, the vocals manage to accelerate, in a feeling that this combination is a new miracle...
The concluding Autonomous is a crazy farewell: the kisses of time and the exploration of souls meet in song, as in a marriage of the stars. John Grant would be happy to see how Kevan is aligned with his ability to express feelings with breaths of sound that gravitate in the low register, but give the feeling of elevation to the edges of the sky. Spectacular!

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

14th November 2023

https://onelittleatlas.bandcamp.com/album/wayfarer?search_item_id=643428781&search_item_type=a&search_match_part=%3F&search_page_id=2963665930&search_page_no=0&search_rank=3&logged_in_mobile_menubar=true