ANDY BULL
Collapse In Bliss (independent)
NOISE IS EASY ENOUGH to recognise and value, or be shocked by. That’s the point after all. Quiet is another thing, much appreciated – if abused by the new age soft boy singer/songwriters – for suggesting sensitivity, intimacy. And making it bare, stripped back, raw (insert your preferred cliche here) does its job when some kind of “authenticity” or “naturalness” is sought.
These are all standard approaches, variations of which you’ll find every week. But Andy Bull has gone for something rarer, more difficult to apply, with his first album in, it seems, a lifetime: delicacy. And it’s a bold, you might even say, brave move.
Delicacy here I use to describe a sound that isn’t gentle and soft, reliant on acoustic instruments and hushed/up-close singing, or placid in its tempos, but it’s not by any means bare or internalised. It doesn’t pound with heavy organic sounds or harsh electronic ones, nor does it layer in its vocals and orchestrations or crank up the rhythm section, but does ask to be noticed and it doesn’t shy from encouraging movement.
And sometimes it feels simultaneously fragile and resilient, weighing nothing but carrying a lot, like the shimmering I Don’t Know Why.
The music mostly is R&B on the edges of pop, as likely to draw from the same sources as Kendrick Lamar or Teddy Riley as it is to tap into Kate Bush and Caribou’s Dan Snaith. Take for example One Thing At A Time, which is both spacious and elemental, like children’s toys filtered through a high-end system, or the title track, which picks up ‘70s jazz and ‘80s smooth American pop and puts them through a woozy electronic process.
And if you were to tell me that God Forbid (That I Just Get What Was Hoping For) had snuck in from a previously unknown 1984 Al Jarreau session with Howard Jones – shiny surfaces and fluid grace – I would believe you.
On top of it all is a high tenor voice that leans into its ambiguity, feels happy to quiver and waver as it reaches high or opens up, and lands comfortably in full exposure without feeling as if it will fall apart. If you think about the distinctive Philly soul men’s upper register and blend it with a kind of mid-80s British synthpop trill you’ll get the idea. And then the clarity of his diction and the clean lines of his phrasing suggests precision but the undercurrent of emotions smudges any lines that might have suggested anything impersonal.
The results of this combination are songs that always seem to hover, even when they land, but snag you with a firm insistence.
Give And Take, a low ocean swell of synthesisers carrying a reclining voice, is airy and cloudy and in brief moments fills out with extra layers, but it never wholly solidifies, nor wholly evaporates. Like A Flame, a soul ballad in waiting, is dressed in the aural equivalent of ‘70s cheesecloth and wide-legged jeans, so lightly touched that you fear a flute played a little more forcefully might blow it all away. And yet it wouldn’t take much at all to make you believe that Bull could drop to his knees and keen, if things took a turn.
Even the instrumental reprise of God Forbid …, which kicks on with a simple locked-in drum/hi hat pattern and walking in Memphis piano that offer rhythmic compulsion, has strings which lean away just enough and flighty, glistening glockenspiel-like overlays, to make this more droll than anything imposing.
What is really impressive about this sonic solution, this comfort with delicacy, is that Bull has been working on this album for quite some time, and in fact one song has existed in part since he was 15. It’s a recipe for noodling and second and third guessing, for more rather than less. But Collapse In Bliss knows what it wants, and just as importantly knows what it doesn’t need.
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