Today, Birthplace, the very first album of Novo Amor, the musical project of the Galois singer Ali John Meredith-Lacey, is released. Justfocus was amazed by this unique and rich folk.
Birthplace is one of those rare albums that we listen to like we watch a movie. We close our eyes and many images invade us, populate our thoughts. We shudder, we sigh, we let ourselves be carried away but in the end, we live! Because that's what it's all about. Of life in all its splendor and majesty, the one that gnaws and shakes us, rocks us and makes us dance. Cruel or tender, it passes over us and remains irrevocable.
The tormented folk of Novo Amor
This is what Ali John Meredith-Lacey , the incredible and talented singer behind the Novo Amor project, is trying to express.From a love story, he moved on to a love for music: that's how Novo Amor was born. Inspired by his own story, by the enchanting setting that allowed him to compose Woodgate, his first EP, a lake not far from New York that deeply marked him.
How to describe this album of unparalleled sweetness and benevolence? There is often a crescendo pattern. Birthplace is the album of the rise in intensity, subtlety, ornamentation, small detail that makes the composition shudder. The effects are spared and spontaneous. It's film music without being one… It is the soundtrack of humanity that develops in your ears to awaken, to amaze your days. To listen during your journeys to make everyday life brighter!
Birthplace, folk reinvented
The album opens with the sweetness of Emigrate. The guitars tickle our senses while the strings open our eyes to the sound universe of Novo Amor. Percussion appears to make your heart beat to the music. Creating emotion: here is the key word! We calm the game, we whisper, we create a kind of tension to let go of a flight. If we listen, we perceive small effects: bass, woodwinds, brass, guitar, percussion … All instruments have an important place in the piece. The brass illuminates the end of the title.This is the beginning of a journey!
With a sense of urgency, the rubbed strings are like the ticking of a clock while the piano seems to want to reassure and reassure us. And then there are those more calm passages where we have the impression of floating, engulfed by strong impacts that also give us a feeling of power. You feel in control of something you don't ultimately master. This is all that is staged in Birthplace and that perfectly illustrates the clip that accompanies it.
Utican starts as a race and the clip confirms it too. It is like a sequence of thoughts that would follow one another in his head as one runs towards infinity. We sometimes manage to abstract and go inside ourselves to no longer perceive the outside. And then we stumble and we regain awareness of the world around us and from which we would like to escape… To this reality that sometimes suffocates us. We seek help, we beg for a better place, hoping that by opening our eyes again, the world will have changed.
Seneca tells the story of a town in Nebraska that is torn apart because of a debate over how many horses can be kept in a garden. Sweet and evanescent, there is nostalgia in this title. As if everything had lost meaning, a kind of weariness grows. We have a disillusioned feeling listening to his stretching notes. The music ceases becomes distant lamentation and returns with more intensity, playing the melodramatic card.
If progressive folk could be invented, then Novo Amors demonstrates it. There is something, beyond experimentation and controlled storytelling: Anniversary is an example of this!
When we try to learn more about how the album was recorded, we discover that Novo Amor's studio in Cardiff is an integral part of the album. On track 13494, we have the impression that the singer wanted to integrate the studio into the album as a member of the band, as an instrument in its own right. We also have this feeling on other titles, where it seems that the slightest squeak, the slightest external sound, related to the environment of the studio participates in the recording and is embedded on the soundtrack that is Birthplace.
Strange song that State Lines. We do not know if it is a story of love, breakup, maybe memory loss … But the fall of this song is truly poignant.Fatality? The percussion comes to deliver a blow while the brass seems to want to resurrect something in agony.
Once again, Novo Amor knows how to surprise us where we least expect it. Sleepless, is a beautiful tender song. The emotion of this "slow" comes to seize us in the heart. We are on a more traditional composition, with synth sounds in the background, more 80's / 90's and yet nothing cliché, nothing in your current trend. We are so far from everything that is being done today.
A small piano-voice that follows wonderfully with the previous piece. In Repeat Until Death we hear a lot of these small imperfections that come to give life to the music. It seems that here we are invited to take stock; We can imagine very well a closed door with oneself, a request to let go, to resilience? Looking out the window, his eyes lost in the distance, but his soul in distress, seeking to breathe new into everything. This turmoil is of incredible beauty; touching and heartbreaking.
Stripped of all the multitude of instruments that Novo Amor has enriched the album, Oh Round Lake is laid bare: no more brass, strings, percussion. Just a few guitars, a little banjo for the last chords. Simple, back to pure folk that offered us his first Ep Woodgate.
In the realm of ballads and inner light, Novo Amor is king. Birthplace is what was missing from the landscape of contemporary folk. Through his instrumental richness, the Galois artist has managed to find the fine border and so much research where music can tell us about our own lives and make us dig towards who we really are.
Novo Amor will be at La Maroquinerie on October 24th to unveil all its titles on stage. A moment that we imagine already grandiose and moving.
This concert will be even stronger thanks to the presence of Anna Leone in the first part. Inevitable!
Facebook event of the concert of Novo Amor and Anna Leone at the Maroquinerie
