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| Quarter Past Wonderful | discogs.com |
“Soon she’s down the stairs /
Her morning elegance she wears /
The sound of water makes her dream /
Awoken by a cloud of steam /
She pours a daydream in a cup /
A spoon of sugar sweetens up”
Over the last few days, I’ve been racking my brain trying to find an unpatronising way of saying ‘unambitious.’
On a clement Wednesday evening this February past, I was flattered to find myself among an intimate group invited to celebrate the twenty-first birthday of a good friend of mine. Clustered around a small, sticky table at a small, snug establishment (on a scale from Coke to beetroot latte, it ranks at approximately a kombucha) we had quite the jolly time. A modest quantity of alcohol was enjoyed, including cocktails served with tiny ice cream cones. A dextrous set of live jazz was appreciated, inclined towards covers of classics but with some slick original material. The diverse selection of gentlemen behind the bar was admired, increasing considerably in handsomeness as the night progressed. An algebraic expression of appropriate ogling quotients was devised, incorporating moustache quality, spectacle geometry, and distance below or above the nipple line an array of ironically garish shirts were buttoned.
That last one may have been just me.
Anyway, I was in bed by half past eleven, and suffered no hangover, literal or figurative. For the birthday boy and for his guests, it was a perfectly lovely evening.
It didn’t have to be some huge club-hopping, absinthe-chugging, police-getting-called-ing party to end all parties, like the many many other blowout shindigs which I have attended because I am cool and have so many friends. Indeed it shouldn’t have been. It’s important to identify your strengths and weaknesses, and to play to the former.
(A clarification: snappy openings aside, ambition shouldn’t be thought of as a single sliding scale, but rather a collection of vectors, differing in magnitude and direction and occupying as many dimensions as necessary.)
Similarly, skyscraping chart-topping meme-generating ambition is not for every musician. Oren Lavie doesn’t need all these accoutrements. On his debut album, The Opposite Side of the Sea, he has already found a flattering template: a gentle wispy whisper, a deftly picked guitar and very little else. I’m quite partial to musical characters sketches. Lavie’s are neat and lucid, and exactly as simple as they need to be.
“[…] In the dark of a room with a wall out of which /
Comes a lamp, but there isn’t a switch /
Locked in a room: it is small, it is not /
It is empty and cold, so you fill it with thoughts […]”
The Opposite Side of the Sea is an anthology of poems: elegant, grounded, focused, with a diverting predisposition to mid-sentence line breaks and mid-line rhymes, complemented by a simple parsing of instrumentation. Fans of my gorgeous husband Salvador Sobral, well-deserved winner of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, will find much to like among this delicate selection of chilled-out, jazzy arrangements. If Lavie had plugged in a distortion amp and seconded his local philharmonic orchestra, there is no doubt he could raze any audience to the ground with ease. Pulling back is hard, and he pulls it off with aplomb.
You don’t have to reach for the stars to hold a moonbeam in your hand.
“And she fights for her life as she puts on her coat /
And she fights for her life on the train /
She looks at the rain as it pours”