Memorial
Memorial
Real Kind Records
2022
Memorial’s self-titled debut album was released a few months back, but it never got the major platform reviews it deserved due to circumstances beyond their control. Hence a new push following some extensive gigging and festivals appearances. And rightly so because this is one of the loveliest, saddest, most exquisite albums of the year. The duo comprises Jack Watts (acoustic) and Oliver Spalding (rhythm, piano), both graduates of Brighton University, although the former now lives in Manchester. They cite the likes of Sufjan Stevens, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Gene Clarke among their influences. However, the most obvious reference point is Bookends-era Simon and Garfunkel, with the beautiful combination of falsetto (Watts) and slightly deeper (Harding) notes. Indeed, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call them the UK’s answer to the iconic duo, as much for their songs as their sound.
The album begins with the warm northern brass of Moth To A Flame. The song uses a simple metaphor to capture the bittersweet nature of unrequited love (“I’m still drawn to your light if it kills me anyway”), moving to the steady strum of the meditative Honest, which continues on a similar theme. However, the love here is of an illicit unobtainable nature (“Can you feel my love/In his arms”).
The lilting, breathily sung, softly plucked Dialtone with Tim Bidwell on omnichord is about connection and offering support in troubled times to a depressed friend for whom things have gone awry (“you moved to your mum’s house/To save up for a ring/But all you spent/Was time/On the wrong things”), a similar note struck on Fake Moon (“Always thought you’d marry/Now I think you never will…Lost in your mid-twenties/Crawling up that solemn hill”), addressed to “an old lost light”.
It’s followed by one of the songs of the year, the divinely harmonised simple but profound Latchkey with Ben Bishop on electric guitar and David Dyson on congas, a reminiscence of an old friend (“What’s that song/Playing in the car/It reminds me of a time I forgot/Is it those guys/You toured with years ago/But never made it to America”), the title an image of being able to unlock those memories and of how much the little things in life matter (“A part of me is holding onto each and every line”). Amy concerns dysfunctional emotions (“You are so/Scared of change/The patterns always remains/Guys fall in love/Head over heels/Then you push them away”), Watts ends with the sad resignation “I’ve got to let you go now”.
Loss and separation follow after being found present again on the hushed pleading of the delicate Midpoint (“It hurts to leave without you/Come with me/Stay”) with Spalding on banjo and Bjorn Agren providing atmospheric guitar, giving way to the scuffed shuffling Broken Record which, reprising the congas and with echoes of S&G’s Overs, essentially touches on the ‘we always hurt the ones we love’ syndrome as “Born in the wrong place/And the wrong time”, they sing “I’ve been unkind/To a girl that loves me/Filling up her mind/With the things I hate about myself”.
The title track itself is a brief 46-second soundscape created by Bidwell, fingerpicked guitar leading back into the rippling nuances of Old Oaks, Lucy Rose on backing vocals, picking up on the image of being broken (“Memories of old oaks/Are of no use/When you’re setting fire to everything you once held true”) and wanting to be a better man that contains the terrific line “I love just like my mother/And she loves recklessly/Oh so faithful, but unlucky”.
With Alex Roberts on slide and Andrew Stuart-Buttle on mandolin and the title neatly encapsulating the album’s running conceit, the dreamily swaying Love Is A Kind of Sadness collects snapshots of holding on to extinguished flames (“A friend treats her happiness/Like an heirloom/A rusted old locket/He’s so scared to lose and it/Should be thrown away/With all the picture and the poems/But he’s desperate for that last song”), of loneliness (“Here I am alone/In room number eleven/Wondering if I’ll ever find the one/Who will look into my eyes/Like it’s the last piece of the sky/And not be blinded by the sun”) and of chasing a thrill it with empty encounters (“the man in the bar/With his wedding ring removed …But the guilt will come soon/You wear your ex-lovers/Like regretful tattoos”).
It ends in the sparse glow of the falsetto-sung Half-Light, closing on a note of heartbreaking yearning between the having and the losing (“Too much love was given/To waste a breath/On saying it was so nice. To know you”) and regret in the lines “In your arms I feel/The pulling of the future/But in photographs I see/How much I hardly knew you”.
Quite simply, this is the most fragile, vulnerable, and intoxicatingly beguiling memorial to broken hearts you’ll hear this year.
Memorial is out now. Order/Save: https://memorial.lnk.to/memorial