We recently featured ‘Home’, the lead single from arrange’s new album, Their Bodies in a Fog. Said album has now been released and I’ve had some time to digest it, so I thought I’d share some thoughts (basically reasons you should go and buy it right now).
The album opens with the brief ‘A Fog’ in which Lacey declares, “Your hearts a strong thing / That you’ve learned nothing about”. This line proves an early taste of the lyrical nature of the album, which comes across as Lacey’s latenight thoughts, vague questions and accusations, pleas and promises and confessions.
‘Home’ opens with a music-box melody and blossoms into a beautiful slice of dream pop. The beat picks up and adds an urgency to the chorus line of, “They see their father’s eyes / When the sun comes up he promises that they’ll be alright”. As I said last time, the horns during the finale seem to herald bigger things, a jump in scope and ambition, the product of an extremely talented musician hitting his stride. This is also apparent in the instrumentation elsewhere on the album, for example, the instrumental ‘Heart//What if This Were It?’ sounds cinematic, like the soundtrack to a tragic finale of a movie.
‘Stranger’ opens with these lonely, floating atmospherics before the onset of a really nice guitar melody. Yes it’s a sad song, but it’s not a typical syrupy dirge, it has a groove, the sort of hip swaying melancholy of later Bon Iver releases. Again the lyrics offer fragments of isolation and self-doubt.
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Another of my favourites is ‘Time’ which opens with a simple mournful piano which repeats and repeats, becoming almost hypnotic by the time it fades out at the end. Lacey delivers the vocals.
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It sounds like r&b minus the swagger, the masculine posturing. It’s more concerned with existential angst than beautiful girls and trite professions of love. But that’s not to say that Their Bodies in a Fog is simply cynical and pessimistic navel gazing. Lacey certainly wears his heart on his sleeve, this is one of the most earnest albums I’ve heard for a long time. But it never becomes too much, presumably because, as the listener, we feel that he’s telling the truth. The angst on show is real and sincere, and I think we can all relate to that.
You can get Their Bodies in a Fog as a pay-what-you-like digital download via Bandcamp, or on limited run cassette tape via Orchid Tapes.