This Friday marks the release of Nashville-based singer-songwriter and artist Andrew Combs‘s new album Sundays (19th August on Loose Music). The album is described as a reflection of the places, both literal and figurative, that inform his work.
Kirby Brown’s album press-notes shares how Sundays was written on the heels of a mental breakdown Combs had at Christmas of 2020—amid the long, monotonous grind of an ongoing global pandemic… In the wake of this debilitating psychological crack-up, Combs turned to the practice of transcendental meditation to find balance and to, in the words of surrealist director David Lynch, “catch the big fish”. Alongside his collaborators, Jordan Lehning and Dominic Billet, Combs would go into the studio every Sunday, the goal being to capture a song he had penned the previous week as he plumbed the depths of his own heart and mind.
He recently shared a video for Anna Please, the third album single, directed by Austin Leih and starring Claire Canada & Kristin Combs.
The song and video tap into the album’s “sense of being mentally and emotionally unmoored, the anxious tension of falling apart, of being incapacitated and grasping at whatever one can hold onto for equilibrium.” The minimalist arrangements throughout this release were captured in mono – “The mono sound ended up being the perfect match for the minimalist, meditative songs I was writing. The overall tone feels like a black-and-white short film.” Like a black and white photo, with the distraction of colour removed, moments, tensions and emotions are heightened.
With Leih’s video, this is demonstrated further, inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers – whose themes include the search for meaning in suffering. While not as dark as Bergman’s claustrophobic psychodrama, it does have an unsettling start, one that hints at helplessness.