After a full week of
caning Father John Misty’s 'I Love You, Honeybear', out of
some inexplicable yet fundamental love for his post-modern,
no-nonsense narcissism/self-doubt dichotomy – and more pertinently,
his ace acoustic cover of Arcade Fire’s 'The Suburbs' –,
it’s a breath of fresh air to return to the land of the earnest, of
cheeks uninhabited by tongues. Tim Korenich, with his debut LP 'What
A Weird Thing', manages a near-perfect combination of alt-folk
nostalgia and modern musical conceit – and here’s how.
The nostalgia game is
nothing new to the wider folk scene. You needn’t look further than
FJM, or Bonnie Prince Billy, or Dad Rocks!, or Mermonte, to find
something that conjures up that very particular nostalgia, perhaps
the same one you feel when hearing that song from ‘Hello Dolly’
at the beginning of 'Wall-E', or any song by George Gershwin
unexpectedly. In this game, Korenich’s album represents the sober
side of today’s '50s-love-pop pastiche – the earnest, measured
approach in comparison to tremolo-singing(/squealing) lovesick-core
TRUDY or surf-rock-Beach-Boys Spring King. There’s a tenderness to
the LP that leans Korenich closer to the place in
‘Singer-Songwritersville’ where Hey, Sleeper and Colin Macleod
(formerly The Boy Who Trapped The Sun) live.
The album opens with
‘What’ll It Take’, a neat introduction that starts the LP off
with Los-Camp guitar, husky vocals and some well-thought harmonies
that are pure ear-candy. The track fills out in a lush, pleasant,
spacey fullness, building with slightness and warmth. The next track
is our first honest-to-goodness taste of what the album perhaps does
best; ‘Darlin’ evokes the slow-paced '60s surf song, those
post-war halcyon days of happily-ever-after, without treading too
heavily on dreampop’s happy-clappy modern takes on the same.
Korenich pairs frank lyrics with vocal lines to make you melt, while
the song’s laid-back aesthetic is contrasted by a lead guitar that
leaps, itches to leave like a small-town kid looking at the bus to
L.A.
‘SRT’ starts out
with a plaintive piano note, repeated over increasingly fervent drums
and falsetto until a horn-imbued denouement/moment of clarity,
whereupon Tim and his backing harmonise along with airy "ba-dums" and "oohs". What follows is ‘Natural Light’, the album’s
lullaby ode. A hymn-esque drone lullaby-holds the warm, clear
electric guitar, honest vocals – "When night falls/I don’t need
walls/to keep the light in/when you strip down to your natural light" – and reverberated horns climbing to somnolent grace. ‘How We’ve Grown’
juxtaposes ‘Natural Light’’s night-time setting with the
fingerpicked guitars of a morning chorus. Lush harmonies stab in at
choice words, while the instruments hit the perfect balance of
enfolding warmth (held by the droned bass part) and toned, trebled
clarity. Korenich’s vocals sit behind the guitar, as if waking to
it and singing still from half-sleep.
‘Sweet Summer Rose’
is a standout track on 'What A Weird Thing', if only for it
being perhaps the most discretely complete songs on the album, as
well as a perfect modern evocation of that '50s love-song nostalgia.
Brushed drums, warm guitar and '60s warble permeate your ears, and
intentionally cliché, dated lyrics melt the heart. ‘Tim Vs Weasel’
brings the album back towards its other mode; synth loops burble
under now-idiosyncratic jazz chords, this time put to a Bonnie-Prince-Billy-meets-Elliott-Smith dirt-folk lament. Loops and
delays melt Korenich’s layered vocals into each other while a
tremeloed electric guitar skitters over like a dying storm cloud.
Tim Korenich's website
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