When you're at the end of your rope, they say, either commit suicide or travel. Thankfully Hrishikesh Hirway traveled, cross-country and even to India, embarking late on one of those somber searching-for-yourself Wanderjahres. From this Ivy Leaguer you might expect a strain of clever self-flagellation falling, in his own words, "somewhere between bedroom electronica and singer/songwriter." But Hirway's music, performed with violinist Jane Yakowitz under the name The One AM Radio, isn't so cut-and-dry. Like Múm on a smaller scale, or a lightly medicated, loose-lipped Four Tet, his introspective songs sway hazily from image to metaphor, between yesterday's folk and tomorrow's digitalism.
Where 2004's A Name Writ in Water flirted with confession, his third full-length This Too Will Pass verges on pure autobiography, a micro-saga of vagabonding and unraveling romance. For a diary in sound, this leans heavily on that old shortcut to immediacy: the second-person. But despite all the you-this and you-that, Hirway never sounds bitter; he's not pointing fingers. "You still felt the same, you said," he sings on "In the Time We've Got", strangely impassive. "But a longing crept into the eyes I'd known." Shepherding us like a tour guide through his own memory, he recites without regret, reports without passing judgment.
Of course, the ubiquitous "you" is a past lover. Echoes of faraway percussion evoke their growing emotional distance, in "Lest I Forget", as recent grief starts chipping away at their relationship. "You lost too much too fast," he consoles her. As the next verse concludes, the line changes to "You changed so much so fast." Hirway handles these classic, easily fumbled themes with rare grace. It could have been a mawkish wreck-- "the words I don't love you anymore," the drowning-saving trope, the oversold tragedy-- but "Cast Away" elegantly recreates the dullness of iced-over love, of being somewhere only physically, lost in either a sleepless funk or dreams "of the same underwater scene/ Where you nearly made your peace."
Hirway mines dreams and nature to telegraph a range of complicated feelings. On "In the Time We've Got" he turns a few scenes, with changing-seasons symbolism, into a collage about foreseeing The Split. "You had the city in you," Hirway sighs on the chorus, draping the whole affair with star-crossed resignation. The ache of recent events has-- at least for this moment-- undone him, reversing what seemed on Writ like a fork-in-the-road decision to embrace his Tamborello-lite, electronic side. He also scales back the flowery emo lyricism that marred that effort. This album is folk to the bone, raw and self-emptying in the vein of Elliott Smith's Roman Candle. But in merely reciting and reporting, Hirway assumes not Smith's wounded whisper, all radiance and suffering, but a sleepy detachment, as if the trauma numbed him or time healed him. Accents of hope streak this anthology on loneliness: The golden days may pass, as the title reminds us, but so will the hard times.
