Over the last decade, the Lisbon-based Nathan Jenkins, who goes by the name Bullion, has created epic songs in miniature. Before moving to Portugal, he hosted a show on London’s NTS online radio station, presenting songs by sophisti-pop stalwarts like the Blue Nile and Prefab Sprout alongside synth-rock ballads by John Martyn and Robert Wyatt. With 2011’s You Drive Me to Plastic and 2012’s Love Me Oh Please Love Me, he made early, sample-heavy attempts to fuse these influences. On his 2016 album Loop the Loop, which he’s described as being about “making changes rather than going over and over on the same old path,” he perfected his own flavor of contemplative pop. We Had a Good Time, his newest collection of songs, explores repetition’s ability to find the novel in the ordinary.
On We Had a Good Time, Bullion uses guitar, synth pads, and reverb for a mellow set of songs that center around memories of the mundane, finding the sublime in the banal. Opener “O Vermona” is made up of an Emeralds-like drone and Bullion’s lightly doubled vocals: “I’ll never go quiet on you.” He cuts the phrase into fragments and layers the pieces, turning a simple declaration into an arresting hook. When he allows the line to play out again before the song goes silent, it has obtained a peculiar power.
The most daring display of repetition-as-technique is the decision to record two versions of one song: “Hula,” which appears halfway through the EP, and “Hula Hula,” the record’s closer. If you aren’t paying attention, you might imagine you are hearing “Hula” a second time. But the subtle additions to “Hula, Hula”—more echo, a new guitar solo, extra bleeps—become evident on closer listening. Only a cryptic lyrical fragment remains the same: “Are people in pain where you are?” In the ebullient “Hula,” the question seems rhetorical, like a public service announcement attempting to make you more aware of your fellow citizens. In the spectral “Hula Hula,” the query evokes a deeper, more existential line of thought: Is there anything you might have missed?
We Had a Good Time is acutely conscious of the fact that memories fade. The elegiac title track, co-written by Diego Herrera (aka Suzanne Kraft), seemingly mourns a past relationship. Though each wash of ambient sound, artificial clap, and synthetic organ is calculated, the cumulative effect is one of real regret. The present will someday be lost; that’s why Bullion is fascinated by the quotidian. We may tire of our everyday surroundings, but if we fail to note them, we dull ourselves to the phenomena of our lives. Bullion’s music is a reminder to look for the momentous in the familiar.
