I don’t know what anyone can add about a band, Kingsbury Manx, whose third best song on their current Ascenseur Ouvert is “Crest” -absolutely gorgeous the song ebbs and flows but it doesn’t really because water ebbs and flows and this song isn’t liquid, it is air. It stands back and moves forward, it feels like a walk in a country field while something important is being said but the meaning is happening in the gestures.
A complete masterpiece of course and not even the best on this superb album. The album is like Midlake, Fairport Convention, without the bullshit -whenever the album could go for it, a song like “Black And Tan” which you can rearrange in your mind, it stands back. The result is something much more generous: a song that seems very kind just like the bloke who wrote it.
“If You’re On The Mend, I’m On the Move” -maybe the best song here, is a folkie pop move (the middle eight is breathtakingly lovely) but despite the pain in the lyric it kinda has no meaness.Sure, everybody reminds me of Louis Armstrong and of course not the song itself, but the emotional openess, I sware, comes from the same place.
Ascenceur Ouvert is a strange name for the album I thought at first: the image of an elevator opening up and a free fall, seems a bit the opposite of what I hear here unless it is a gravity free fall but maybe that’s the reference, it is so lovely, so beautiful -it’s like you wonder how much better it can be.
I admit to being a Paul Finn fan. Maybe I’m a softie but I appreciate kindness when it is shown to me. But
I don’t appreciate it enough to lie -this is an overwhelmingly beautiful album that has enough of a sense of self to hold back. It is the anttithesis of a U2 -it reaches its highest point at the moment it laid back the most. By the time you reach the strings on “Crest” you might think you’re in heaven. Maybe you are. Il n’ya plus bien, dudes.