By Todd Lavoie
LAST DAYS
The Safety Of The North
(n5MD)
Keep your best headphones handy — you’re going to want them for spins of The Safety Of The North, the third and most recent full-length release from Edinburgh, Scotland-based Graham Richardson and his ambient/electro-folk Last Days project. As ominous as the artist’s AKA might be, the disc is nowhere near as fearful or nightmarish as one might expect. Rather, the music found here is intimate and ruminative, frequently glowing from ripples of electronics and shoegaze-y guitar textures. Delicate acoustic finger-picking and understated piano meditations add further flair to these largely-instrumental womblike pieces, and the occasional insertion of the human voice into the mix helps immensely in making this a thoughtful, emotional listen.
And while the proceedings sometimes veer towards melancholia, it’s a strangely comforting, sit-around-and-ponder-on-a-grey-day stripe of melancholia we’re talking about here — a little maudlin and wistful, yes, but ultimately cathartic in the end. Even the cold chills which bluster forth from the disc’s lower register from time to time offer their own curiously cocooning sensations to the listener — especially with the help of a good pair of headphones. The Safety Of the North is something worthy of surrender — of succumbing to its many hums and whirrs and whipping auroras of shimmering light.
There’s a back story to the album, though it isn’t required knowledge for appreciating its many charms: Richardson composed these 15 songs around the themes of of change, struggle, and hope. Specifically, it concerns a young girl, Alice, and her family. Disenchanted with city living, they decide to “move north” (the Arctic Circle, judging from a couple of contextual clues provided along the way) to find a simpler, quieter day-to-day life. Such major upheavals usually don’t come about without their share of challenges, however. Thus Richardson has constructed a story-arc which from sadness to hope to struggle to sadness to hope once again. More or less so, anyway. Again, since this is mostly an instrumental recording, the itinerary on this emotional journey is up to the listener, I suppose. Still, the prevailing themes of The Safety Of The North — change, struggle, hope — remain palpable, even without too much assistance from lyrics. Forgive me for trotting out the “cinematic” tag (I know that the label gets used quite regularly for any sort of wordless music which manages to create vivid, stirring images) but it honestly does apply to Richardson’s music. Even if concrete images fail to come to mind, the creation of particular moods is tough to miss.