Lyric of the month, easily. And Paul Duncan is true to his word, keeping the yakking to a minimum throughout Be Careful What You Call Home, instead allowing his voice to mingle with the other instruments as just another useful wave-form. In fact, this album is so subtle that the first time you listen to it, it barely registers, like a ghost whisper or a beige amongst browns. But it leaves you with a pleasant sensation and sucks you back for more spins, and by the third or fourth time through, it's difficult not to be hooked on its blend of pastoral beauty and electronic abstraction.
As the album develops its gently experimental approach, Jim O'Rourke and Fridge spring to mind as good comparison points, and like them Duncan's drum sound warrants its own little mention as a thing of rare beauty. The rest of the sonic palette is comprised of Rhodes, bass, glockenspiel, strings, and other soft things that sound great put up against the boom of the drums, which Duncan chops into new shapes as he sees fit. Duncan's voice is a soft and tuneful tenor that slides into that texture as if on a river of Vaseline.
"Oil in the Fields" is the best distillation of the album's overall aesthetic, riding a thumping kick drum, brushed cymbals and pretty Rhodes chords, synth counter-melodies tumbling like snow behind Duncan's impressionistic verses. "I remember father's ring/ Remember mother's hair/ Don't remember the color of her eyes/ Until I look at mine" he sings, and the song follows a free-form structure from there, breathy vocal harmonies rising in the middle and glockenspiel leading the walk to the end.
In a time of hyperactive music, quiet beauty like this is a welcome chance to calm the caffeinated nerves. If Be Careful What You Call Home is uniform, it's uniform in the right way, wringing a satisfying listen out of a simple premise.
