“I’ll speak of love, if you’re buying / I know I’m lost, not for trying.” So sings Ian Williams on ‘Speak to Us of Love’, a single from the new Lamplight album Lick the Spoon, Let It Soften and a neat encapsulation of the spirit of the release. Across thirteen songs, Williams paints “a picture of life in all of its uncertainty and with both the love and the grief left intact,” as we wrote in a preview, the record hoping to move forward while simultaneously embracing the bumpy and often non-linear path presented to us. The search presented on ‘Speak to Us of Love’ is essentially the mission of the entire release. Lost Williams might be, but Lamplight serves as a vehicle in which he might rediscover his way once again.
Though of course, the result is not that simple. Just as life is more complex than a journey from A and B, so to does Lick the Spoon, Let It Soften reimagine what finding the correct path might look like in practice. Which is to say, it rejects the notion some map exists to steer our course, and instead views the quest from a different angle. The aforementioned single was inspired The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran and the connection between this iteration of Lamplight and Gibran’s work is illuminating. “That book speaks about love like an actor, more than something that can be given, taken, broken, lost,” Williams explains. “Someone that changes us, that does not soften itself when we are weak, though it can be gentle. That perspective is very much present throughout the record, and this song is from deep in the throes of learning to see love this way.”
Part of this process is learning to not only be centred in the moment, but to allow oneself comfort in the knowledge that it will give way to another whether we wish for it or not. Take ‘Clover’, a single that “seems suspended between the retrospection of mourning and a look towards future dreams,” as we continued in our earlier piece, “turning to the small certainties of the present as a kind of balm against the otherwise debilitating doubt which might set in when asking life’s big questions.” Elsewhere the present moment is less than inviting, be it ‘Altar’ with its ominous skies or the unabashed despair of ‘I’ll Be Careful With It’, yet with equal parts compassion and patience, Lamplight attempts to recognise each experience as just another part of richer, more fulfilling whole.
The mood culminates in the near-triumphant closer ‘Ring Stains’, song which doesn’t quite reach two minutes in length yet contains the multitude of emotions which precede it. For a record built around a search or question, you might expect the finale to arrive as an answer, the destination finally reached, but instead it functions more like a snapshot of recognition caught within the ongoing motion. The realisation that life itself is that very momentum, and that nothing dear to us is ever quite lost from our lives, no matter how it sometimes might feel. “I think the majority of us have a tendency to think of love as a finite resource,” Williams as explains in the album notes. “I don’t think that’s true. If love has happened, it is there, permanently etched in the fossil record.” Lamplight is here to speak of love and we’d all do well to listen. Lost he might be, but aren’t we all? The important thing is that he’s trying.
Lick The Spoon, Let It Soften will be released on the 23rd October via Western Vinyl and you can pre-order it now.
Cover art by Pauline Mauruschat