We explained in our preview piece how Adeem the Artist rose from the ashes of Kyle Adem, or maybe from beneath his shed skin. Either way, his first album with the new moniker, the aptly-named Kyle Adem is Dead, is out this Friday (8th April).
Adeem wrote an excellent piece which shone a light on the whole change, highlighting just how much weight the metamorphosis carries for him. It’s clear from the first listen to the new album that something major has taken place, the writing and delivery imbued with a sense of sincerity beyond anything on his music to date. The opening track ‘Good Evening’ serves as the introduction to this new/real Adeem, although it feels like a two-way thing, like he is as eager to meet you as you are him. As we described in the previous post:
“[Good Evening is] forged from that peculiar kind of earnestness which makes you feel comfortable, the sense that someone is willing to listen… ‘This is me,’ Adeem is saying. ‘Now who are you?'”
‘Impossible’ is a song about the beauty and strength that can be found in fragility, sounding like a cross between Small Houses and Great American Desert, while ‘Cincinnati’ channels Gregory Alan Isakov in its sad tale of Midwestern life, a world where things don’t work out as expected, as if tipping towards some larger tragedy. ‘Quiet Songs’ is a creeping heartbreaker not loud in terms of instrumentation but deafening in its words, the lyrics standing stark against an echoing silence. In much the same way as Noah Gundersen, Adeem the Artist manages to sound at once tender and enraged, seized by the words coming from his throat as if in frenzy. The song charts the progression of a person who knows they are different, starting from their birth into a conservative family where guns came before any clear sense of identity, and following them through school (“everybody knew I was a dark kind of kid”) and the rest of life. In an effort to regain (and then communicate) a sense of self, they turn to anger (“I was older when I learned that you gotta yell / and summon some hell /if you want to be heard”) before tragedy lets the façade drop enough for their true, earnest self to poke through.
“And I got scared when you were dying
it changed the melody for me
between the stones we threw to keep ourselves from crying
and the soft moments composed of unsung harmoniesI didn’t think that things would be perfect
I just thought you would listen
I just thought you would hear”
‘Good Ship Jesus’ has a mean country twang, the talk of devils and saviours foreshadowing the references to racism and discrimination by authorities which form the final verse, while ‘Waiting’ is altogether warmer and more hopeful, a bona fide love song tracing the possibilities for development and betterment within a relationship and opening up the possibility of fate or true love or some similar phenomenon. ‘Asphalt’ is a Dylan-esque folk song about falling head over heels, ‘We Learnt To Cry’ a slow, cathartic number in which suffering is the binding force of a relationship, and ‘Sidewalk’ is a frenetic folk song which borders on performance poetry or rap, the words streaming out as if from a man given three minutes to clear his heart or mind or both. From this, ‘We Belong Here’ emerges with a gentle intimacy, the couple here linked not be some grand understanding of life or love but rather a common confusion, a willingness not only to face strange, unknowable questions together but to accept this company as enough.
“We belong here inside the mystery of facing one another
here inside this endless, burning collage of color
here inside the searching, and the hurting, and the wonder.We belong”
‘Midway Motel’ is an electrified Americana number carved out of small town nostalgia, where time passes like a desert wind or else a lightning flash, childhood dreams lost to the fierce grip of obligations and expectations, and the closing track, ‘Goodbye’, is equal parts compassionate and fierce. Part love song, part demand for answers, the song finds Adeem seized by love and fear and that all-too-human dissatisfaction, the inability to accept that life amounts to no more than growing and working and shrinking slowly towards your grave.
“Life can be hard
when you aren’t quite sure who you are
or where you’re going.Sitting alone in my car,
I felt my heart explode into an epitaph.Is this the plan of a perfect God?
Breeding and depleting and then falling apart
well, all I hear is the sound of goodbye.
Don’t say goodbye”
The word ‘sincere’ is often taken as synonymous for affectionate or sentimental. While it might be true that, deep down, us humans are often feeble, dewy-eyed creatures pretending otherwise, true sincerity involves a whole lot more than confessing love. We also hide things like depression, discontentment and fear of death, decidedly un-saccharine facets of the human condition we’d rather forget, feelings which can eat us up and void whatever love we might be holding. With Kyle Adem is Dead, Adeem the Artist strives to be sincere in every sense, finding the bravery not just to declare his love for his wife but to voice his fears, his weaknesses, his exasperation with life as we live it. With everything on the table, no lingering mysteries or secrets withheld, there is nothing left to corrupt the good things. Because, after all, Kyle Adem is dead.
Kyle Adem is Dead is out on Friday. Keep an eye on the Adeem the Artist Bandcamp page to buy it, or snag it from iTunes.
Artwork by Hannah Bingham