Luke Sital-Singh – A Golden State
Raygun Records – 5 April 2019
Luke’s recently relocated from Bristol to L.A. with his artist wife, as reflected in the album title and deftly encapsulated in Los Angeles, a warm, gentle, intimately sung fingerpicked contemplation of making the move and his need for reassurance, the English rain sounding as though it’s cheering them on.
While there’s not a huge variation of mood or tempo throughout the other numbers, the end result is captivating, the album opening with Lover, another song about transition, as, his voice soaring on the refrain, he sings, “Maybe we’ll never make it/Whoever makes it anyway? I know we’re making less mistakes.” The notion of change also infuses the steady shuffling self-improvement themed Raise Well, the chorus again lifting the vocals heavenwards as he contemplates starting a family and talks about coming out of his shell and confessing “I just wanna raise love, I don’t wanna raise hell.”
Accompanied by piano, and sounding a little like mid-period Paul Simon, he’s in particularly excellent form on The Last Day, a tender musing on mortality as he looks ahead to his final day and wonders how what condition he’ll be in (“Will I be blue, held up with glue?”), whether his lover will be by his side, how he’ll spend his final hours and if he’ll have remembered to thank all those he’s known for the part they played in his life. But, more than anything, it’s a tender love song about being thankful for true love and of holding their hand tight every night before he falls asleep, just in case.
Airing his falsetto, thoughts drift back to his wedding day on the descending piano scales of I Do, again love proving a salvational power (“I think I died and I know I came alive”) and emotional rescue in times of self-doubt (“I’m cynical of heaven now, but you make me believe”) with hints of Leonard Cohen at his most devotional as the song reaches its climax.
One of the more musically fleshed-out numbers with its drums and Telecaster guitar, the gorgeous Silhouette is still a dreamy, hazy drift, the melody ebbing and flowing between verse and chorus, another song about finding himself and not buckling under the weight of the world and only seeing the dirt that comes with the wonderfully evocative line “You know my heart is made from wood, reclaimed from home/And every day I splinter less, I hope.”
Musically echoing the sound of his first EP, brushing the strings of his guitar, Almost Gone returns to the idea of moving on and recovery (“I know I lost my innocence/I think it might be back again”), soaked in melancholy at the end of a relationship and of “All of the words that clog my chest/I will never, ever speak”, offering the hard-earned wisdom that “You feel stronger when you’re weak.”
The rippling fingerpicked Souvenir, another trace of Simon, would seem to be another number informed by the move to Los Angeles (“I’ll take a souvenir just before leaving here”), although, if you want to take a darker perspective, it’s also possible to see it as about mortality and not going into white alone, putting a different spin on the line “My one and only dear, you’re coming with me there.”
There’s a darkness too hovering around the Love Is Hard Enough Without The Winter, an evocatively titled simple, stark voice and guitar number that, revisiting the very first guitar solo he recorded, piercingly captures the emotional pressures of keeping a relationship together under the forces of duress, be that illness, depression, guilt, remorse or unspoken tensions.
It ends with another reference to winter with Heart’s Attach, a naked and exposed piano ballad about reconnection, opening up and allowing the light of love in, but also of escaping from “facing up/To the Gods and what I can’t overcome” with an anthemic chorus of
Do you remember when the nights felt heavy?
When new love was the energy holding us together
We’d run ’til there was no way back
I wanna take you out on a Saturday night
Make you feel like a wild and blinding light
I wanna run ’til our fears turn back
And we feel our hearts attach
that conjures the exploding hearts of Snow Patrol, Jim Steinman and Springsteen.
Infused with both sadness and joy, pessimism and hope, it’s a cathartic and emotionally impassioned work that, both creatively and geographically heralds a new chapter in his life and career. It’s golden.
The album cover artwork, a four-colour lino cut of the Venice Beach canals created by Hannah Cousins, is taken from her art book, Coastline (order at www.hannahcousins.com), which chronicles a two-week road trip Hannah and Luke took down California’s iconic Pacific Coast Highway between San Francisco and LA.