Chartreuse

An eternal struggle against time. A concept only barely existing upon all of human abstraction. Taking more than it can give, its thievery is only recognisable in anguish after the fact. It’s only when a state has changed or a situation has dissolved that you realise the only physical record of past experience is what exists in your brain. Things Are Changing Too Quickly extracts and distills the torturous feeling that the unending, foreboding onslaught of time invokes. The pulp of which stimulates the sad and late recognition of a condition’s passing. Written by a man before he’d properly entered adulthood, it’s sort of a self referring antidote to the content it addresses, in that it stood the test of time within his creative endeavour. Is it autumn already?

Slice-of-life art. Only the most tactful display of creative prowess can address the mundane squarely, and display it as a piece for you to enjoy. The artist in this sense acts as a refraction point: the beam of light of everyday happening hits them, where they as a worthy conduit can turn it into an array of meaning. “Yeah, it’s pretty nice.”

Here I always thought they demonstrated a claim for a James Bond theme. You’ll just have to listen for yourself.

The visuals that go with this are immense, and really do this genuinely powerful track justice. It just gets its claws into you - ‘petrifyingly beautiful’ as described by a YouTube comment. The quality of production on this, and the entire album, leads you to trawl the credits expecting to see a familiar industry name. Yet, it’s the man behind the lyrics himself. He does breakdown videos on Instagram of his process and how the tracks form with input of the whole band. Hearing the sounds in isolation, you’d assume only a musical alchemist could conjure something as impactful a record as ‘Morning Ritual’.

The dual-vocal dynamic of Chartreuse graces us with feminine influence in this track, and closes off with a fittingly evocative guitar solo. We have a penchant for guitar pieces that, on the surface, appear compositionally simple, yet are able to dig deep and move around your neurons, each note carrying weight greater than its mass. “I mourned myself, and grieved hope.”