“One day, my heart won’t break / Then maybe I’ll step out of my body / Maybe I’ll burst into bloom,” sings Cloudbelly‘s Corey Laitman on ‘Handfuls’, a single from their new full-length i know i know i know. “But this morning, it feels unlikely / And with this snow, falling slow / I don’t know that I want for it to.” Written in the wake of the breakdown of two important relationships in Laitman’s life, the album has been described as “a document of their sincere effort to grieve; to remember; to take stock; to get angry; to forgive; and to reconcile the painful necessity of those relationships coming to an end.” The duality so apparent on ‘Handfuls’ is therefore a signature of the record more generally. Be it on ‘If You Want’, which we’ve previously described as “slow and syrupy, warm and nostalgic but tempered with a sharp edge of loss and regret and conflicted emotion,” or ‘Restless Things’ with its tension between nostalgic reflection and the urge to move on.
Oh we had time, well you know, at times
Time was all we had
Our distances fell flat to parallel horizons
Not quite happy, not quite sad
‘Garbage’ possesses the lonely intimacy of an empty room, nothing but plucked guitar and vocals for the opening half before layers of samples build like memories flashing past. ‘November’ is also full of sober feeling. As we wrote in a preview, the track takes “the melancholy of the titular month and infus[es] it with a marching rhythm to evoke the precious fragility of love.” A similar momentum drives ‘Fascinated’, the first full song on the record which immediately pitches the audience into the cathartic spirit of the Cloudbelly sound. It’s an anthemic introduction, compete with pounded percussion and singalong chorus of the tears-in-your eyes, empowering variety, but its again shaded with a sense of tender intimacy, a refusal to gloss over life’s anxieties and complications.
What results is a sense of hard won conviction. Lessons learnt not via bright epiphany but the slow grind of living through difficult circumstances. Understanding how to not only roll with the punches but rise from knockout blows. “So it’s been strange sailing these days,” as Laitman sings on ‘Bloom’, “The nights turn my empty pockets out / And fill them with moon, and the wind / And the wild, blooming bruise / Of beginning again.” With resilience comes the hope of something better and kinder. Days in which they might step out of their body, or finally burst into bloom.
i know i know i know is out now via Strange Library Records and available from the Cloudbelly Bandcamp page.
