The softly shuffled and skittering beats, circular mournful piano melodies, and beautifully diaphanous vocals blend in a space, elsewhere, a place resonating out of body and beyond time.
Emily Cross (Cross Record), Jonathan Meiburg (Shearwater) and Dan Duszynski, along with a couple of collaborations from Laurie Anderson’s AI model, form an intimate unit with minimal instrumentation and explore notions of partnership, loss, regeneration, and fighting the feeling that we're all in this alone. The album title is culled from one experiment with Anderson’s AI which generated poetry around a photo sent to the artist by Meiberg during one of many low periods attempting to record this album. The galvanized response Anderson’s words gave the trio resulted in a renewed kinship, after feeling like they’d lost touch along the way. The poetry is dropped liberally throughout the album's lyrics, acting as a thread on which to tug all other emotions.
The naked rawness of “Please, Come In”, “Unbraiding” and “I Swallowed A Stone” have echoes of the similarly scant pain often heard in Low’s music. When the pace is quickened into more regulated beats on “Arrhythmia” there’s a more urgent search for answers, whatever it is they’re searching for but having taken a few songs to settle and introduce their sounds it’s on “How It Starts” where Loma take flight. The waltzing piano motifs possess a warmth and hope previously absent. The lilting tone of Cross’s voice as she sings, “Faith is a rhyme / Like weather / Knows to name you / Knows to feel you / Distant bells / Ringing in my mind / And tapering / Slow motion.” There’s a building surge with spacy synths accenting each line. “I know it's old but / Don't believe it / Burn my bed / Rub my eyes / This is how it starts to move again”. The almost magical musical tone is hypnotic, intoxicating, and wholly believable.
It’s from this point that How Will I Live Without A Body? begins
to take root in its own organic resurrection. “A Steady Mind” whirs
away from the darkness and having embraced the lowest point seemingly
springs to life. With the album title and so many of the song lyrics and
titles referring to bodily motions and dealing with psychological
processes, it’s a little jarring to feel the rather prickly new lease of
life the trio has on “Pink Sky” as it seems to prowl and climb as if
learning anew. Part nightmarish limbs reaching out everywhere and moody
shadows to be avoided.
Loma flesh out the spare moments and enable their earthy
sound to flourish. However sinister or unsure the music sounds it’s
always anchored by Cross's cool, clear voice. “Broken Doorbell” explores
agoraphobic feelings and calls back to the album opener in beckoning
people inside before venturing out with the sounds of the sea washing
over a beach. You can feel the spray in the air. We also see mirrors of
the sparseness from earlier but this evolves into layered and
embellished bright chords with backing vocals that shimmer.
How Will I Live Without A Body? ends on a high as the
happy saunter of “Affinity” and bucolic “Turnaround” where the “Sun
rises and falls in the air” both shed any fears the band has held on to
before. Today has triumphed and tomorrow may be unknown but now it’s far
less scary. There’s an enchantment in the album's pacing and sequencing
that we journey with the band through each of these emotions and emerge
from trepidation with renewed hope, feeling reborn.
