"I hope you find a source of positivity from within the themes of isolation and death found on the album," Sam Howard writes in the liner notes to Ark, the 21-year-old's full-length debut as Halls. I picked up the record when Hurricane Sandy was just a huge blip on the radar, but I listened more intently when I started scrolling through footage of the aftermath, unable to leave my apartment even after the government-mandated house arrest had elapsed. Howard has said in interviews that recording these songs gave him solace during a period in which he couldn't leave his home. "Halls was a way of calming me down," he said. And here I was, kind of doing the same thing, except with a giant crane hanging like the Sword of Damocles just a few blocks away. Ark isn't a comforting album but it went with what I was seeing. "It all feels as though it was written in the aftermath of some terrible upset or shock," The Guardian's Paul Lester wrote.
It wasn't always this way. Halls, who left previous bands because he doesn't "work well with other people," has been steadily honing his approach to making music with keyboards and a laptop. Last year's self-titled debut EP found him painting instrumental ambience with a broad, pretty, boring brush. On January's Fragile EP, he livened up his cinematic soundscape with a Sigur Rós sample, a live piano, and his own deeper, louder voice. Ark, Halls' debut full-length of just 10 months later, sounds like a different person wrote it. You can hear what he's saying most of the time. He lets the music fall out sometimes. The most telling difference, however, is the samples, which were recorded at churches and conservatories in the London area.
The minute-long "Arc" raises hairs with an original choral composition by Howard, which originally appeared in "White Chalk" alongside a choir singing Mozart's "Ave Verum Corpus" at Blackheath's Conservatoire (for all his specificity in the liner notes, Halls doesn't clarify if the two pieces are sung by the same singers). And the title track fills a creaky ambient background with a sparse piano line recorded in the same venue. With a crow cawing in the background and steps receding in the background, it could be the last piano on earth. This all means that Howard's creation myths don't quite line up (if he couldn't leave his house, how did he go to church?) but the ends justify the means here. "I", for example, opens Ark with a field recording in St. Martin in the Fields in London, which supposedly sets the tone for the record. It's not much-- worshipers file in and out of church-- but it accomplishes a lot. Imagining Howard making the album alone in his room, replaying the conversations of he recorded of people around him, feels indescribably lonely.
As with a lot of depressive downbeat electronic music with vocals, Radiohead is the most obvious influence. Howard's rich yet hollow timbre, like a choirboy singing about emotions he's too young to understand, strikes a chord with Thom Yorke's, especially on "Roses for the Dead" and "Shadow of the Colossus", both driven relentlessly to their emotional climaxes ("It's like a dashboard/ Something to take the blow") with clicks and whispers. In Howard's description of "I'm Not There" he says he wrote the song for "the voice of the dead." He seems to takes it upon himself to convey them: "In darkness, it is my voice, the only one/ The only one that knows the work that bends before the light," he cryptically sings on "Reverie", Ark's most instrumentally barren song "sung from the perspective of a person who has lost their life partner, and is left to contemplate their loss every night." It's like the post-post-dubstep version of "I'm Not There", eschewing the percussion of James Blake's signature synth-led space for a guitars, live drums, and violins. Both find their inverse in the penultimate track "Holy Communium", which builds chiming and skittering to a drum crescendo worthy of Philip Selway.
It's unfortunate that by the end of the album, these less-than-subtle paeans overshadow the intakes of breath from the choir on "White Chalk" or the wooden creaks of the pew in "Winter Prayer". Specific to Halls, those quieter moments are Ark's most affecting and how it should be remembered. Howard has come a long, emotionally taxing way from the aptly named Sounds of Sweet Nothing, the label that released Fragile. Even though much of Ark was written and recorded then, Halls' sounds of nothing are no longer sweet. It's the attempt to fill what's left behind after something, be it a life partner or an entire seaside community, has been taken away.
