There's a shot that crops up often in nature documentaries or early in the third act of movies that focus on a character's personal growth: An icicle slowly melts in tentative drips, or a cluster of pine needles covered in snow suddenly shakes off its crystalline burden. It's a shot that communicates things like “time has passed, slowly but surely” and “the character you're about to see has been through some deep contemplation!” But it works because there is something about the stark calm of late winter that seems to match up with those periodic spells of reflection, the slow, occasional seasons we spend gradually and deliberately healing or learning. They stretch on forever and then are suddenly complete. They feel like a dream.
Irish singer James Vincent McMorrow's sophomore effort Post Tropical is an album that seems suited to such seasons. It's a winter album in ways that go beyond its release date, with lyrics about “elements of frost” and “cold air” and taut, pensive songs that carry a pristine stillness. There are spare, open moments of longing vocals over solitary piano notes and stabs of sunny revelations in the periodic horn arrangements and cymbal crashes. Above all, Post Tropical is pretty. It's also the type of music to grow with for a little while as a personal soundtrack, a companion for a few months that one might fondly check in with from time to time later on.
If the album has that intimacy, it's likely because Post Tropical comes as a more personal turn for McMorrow. His first album, Early In The Morning, was a comforting collection of guitar folk that found unexpected acclaim and commercial success, charting well in several European countries and landing McMorrow high-profile performances on Later... With Jools Holland and elsewhere. But the acoustic guitar wasn't, according to McMorrow, what he intended to stake his career on. Inspired by the rediscovery of an old hard drive full of efforts at recreating N.E.R.D. songs, the resulting departure on Post Tropical is an attempt to channel the spirit of the electronic music, R&B and hip-hop that McMorrow likes to listen to.
In practice, the new bent means mostly swapping out the guitars for pianos and horns and using the occasional swatch of electronic drums. Although it does passingly resemble the low wattage D'Angelo tributes that get passed off on many blogs as R&B, to call Post Tropical that does a disservice to both the genre and the album. McMorrow's falsetto, already impressive, gets pushed to new heights that could call to mind Maxwell but are more likely to inspire comparisons to others in the indie and folk sphere like Bon Iver's Justin Vernon or the Antlers' Pete Silberman, particularly given the lyrical tone and a backing template that might feel at home on projects by either of those acts.
That voice is McMorrow's best tool, confessional and energizing whether he's hitting the unexpected climax of “there's no sense at all” on “Glacier” or using it to construct a plaintive mantra at the end of “Red Dust” with the repeated lyric, “sometimes my hands they don't feel like my own/ I need someone to love I need someone to hold.” The tone is pained, but the effect is both beautiful and comforting throughout, particularly in the way the album's songs often build to a single yearning, repeated phrase, like “I remember my first love” or “there is so little light from the warmth of the sun.”
Lyrically, the material is generally more oriented toward pulling emotions out of specific sounds of syllables than cohering into clear narratives or even realistic images (consider, for instance, that last line, from “Outside, Digging”, which sounds right but actually reverses cause and effect between light and warmth we're used to). The overall effect can be a little bit free associative, and it plays into the album's biggest weakness: While these songs are pretty, they don't really stand out as songs so much as meandering compositions that follow a similar, slow crescendo formula. There's nothing with the immediate structure or dramatic pull of a song like Early in the Morning's “We Don't Eat”.
But if the album does tend to drift rather than deliver hits, the drifting is awfully pleasant and particularly accomplished. Songs like “Cavalier”, “Outside, Digging” and especially “Red Dust”, an arresting blend of 808 drum machines and swirling piano, hit such memorable vocal highs that they feel both instantly familiar and starkly refreshing. At the same time, many of the best moments are more subtle surprises: the keening country guitars that swoop through the background of “The Lakes”, the flitter of clarinet that plays atop the plink of guitars at the end of “All Points”, the gorgeous depth of the low horn notes that build to the climax of “Glacier”. With its deliberate, languorous pleasures, this is an album to live with, settle with and be crisply rejuvenated by.
