Benjamin Shaw‘s bio describes him as “Canadian born, Blackpool raised, and London beaten”, which perhaps gives a small insight into his appreciative-of-beauty-yet-decidedly-miserablist music. You know, that kind of attitude where you’re pretty sure the world is chaotic and cruel and generally unconcerned with your wellbeing, yet unable to shake off the notion that things can be amazing and beautiful and surprising in life-changing ways (an idea most likely conditioned into us by television and film). His four previous albums have fallen into two rough boxes, the idiosyncratic folk/rock of There’s Always Hope, There’s Always Cabernet and Goodbye, Cagoule World, and the noise/ambient seen on Rumfucker and Summer in a Box Room.
His new album, Guppy, definitely falls into the latter category, an album of lush ambient music bookended with genre-bending tracks which hint at Shaw’s thinking. Opener ‘Pride Of Canada’ is the first, an industrial-sounding song of shambling drums and throbbing noise which swells toward what are pretty much the only vocals on the album, with Shaw sounding pretty defeated and self-loathing:
“I don’t know what I should do
with all this great potential,
I’ll probably piss it up the wall
and claim artistic intention.“I don’t know who I should blame
for all my bad decisions,
there’s so many, they’re all such dicks
I haven’t time for this.”
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‘Palette Cleanser (So’s Your Face)’ begins with whirling strings which slowly subside into a single furious whine. This is eventually joined by warm drones akin to those on Lejsovka & Freund’s Mold on Canvas, before falling victim to distorted buzzes and the concluding sounds of haunted piano and poltergeistic percussion. The drones grow again into ‘Pylon Pile-On’, which we described in our preview as “something comfortably sad and vividly alive, like watching rain fall onto a city from the window of a train”. This mood is interrupted comically by the retro shampoo ad on ‘Good Arrows’ (“Everyone knows that beautiful hair makes a girl look beautiful!”), as if your view from the train is broken by the empty promises of billboards. The track evolves into a Trouble Books-y song of spacey electronics and background noises which sounds like vocals either ancient or alien or both. The conclusion features the disembodied voice from a vintage radio programme, playing on a loop like a broken museum exhibit, gradually fading behind the noise like the ever decreasing echoes of a history slipping to the back of public consciousness.
“Coal mines and slag heaps, narrow cobbled alleyways and ugly rows of back to back houses”
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The next few tracks continue the memory theme. ‘Hell’s Teeth’ is a low deep hum adorned with minimal piano and a field recording of people chatting, with wobbles with bursts of noise like something from a horror soundtrack, as if a troubled mind is trying and failing to look back with rose-tinted glasses. ‘Dreams of Fields (Cows)’ opens with what can only be described as a weird little squelchy froggy noise, before muffled piano carries the track through flitting electronics and dripping water and an insectile hum. The damp imagery continues with ‘Fishing with Dad (No Dad)’, a track which buzzes with life yet still sounds distant, the musical equivalent of looking back at old photos and crying with equal parts fondness and regret, amazed at how you managed to bumble through life taking everything you had for granted.
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As if acknowledging the emotional turmoil across the record, second bookend ‘Not Today, Satan’ is built around a voice, omniscient and semi-robotic but also kind-sounding. Like one of those disarmingly sincere internet scams, the voice is hugely compelling despite setting off major alarm bells in the cynical part of your brain, tempting you into believing everything can be solved without time or pain or effort by one magical arrangement of words.
“Let’s clear the air about some certain things, let’s talk heart to heart. Are you saying to yourself, just about now, ‘I can’t change, I’ve tried and tried many times but failed. There’s something terribly wrong with me that makes me different form other people. There’s a deep dark secret that keeps me from being a total person’. Let me clue you into something, my dear friend. Everyone has something wrong with them, whether it be drinking, or drugs, or perversion. Now listen very closely because I’m going to say something very imp-”
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Guppy is about being human, an album which tries to provide instinctive answers to unanswerable questions. Or rather, one which formulates the human-questions correctly, allowing the creator (and, by proxy, us) to transcend their bifocal, street-level view, their smallness, to look down on things from a comfortable position, making the absurd, confusing and overwhelming world become, for the shortest of whiles, knowable. The result (for the creator and us both) is a weird sense of attachment to our situations, a form of nostalgia for a life never easy but uniquely ours, that feeling of calm wonder which visits all too rarely (when driving home after a happy family gathering or watching a foreign sunset) where some semblance of context is achieved and a strange joy is found in melancholy. We know we have to go back down, but for now at least, that is okay.
Guppy is out now on Kirigirisu Recordings, and you can buy in now from Bandcamp.