Review Summary: a compendium of lullabies for lucid dreamers
Much like the gangly contortionist Amazing Amy Harlib who adorns the cover, MASS boasts a remarkable malleability. There’s something almost ritualistic about the way these eight tracks are constructed, each a reassembly of the same pieces into different, transformed wholes. In the wrong hands, that process could come across as overly indulgent recycling, watered down a little more each time. SoftSpot are largely able to keep their form through unabashed saturation, shedding light on the contours of an ethereal roadmap for those who see the most when their eyes are closed.
It certainly helps that singer Sarah Kinlaw, faintly flaunting the same free-form diction as Kate Bush or Joanna Newsom, owns a voice that ought to be prescribed to the world-weary. Throughout MASS, it seeps through the dense sponge of instrumentation to numb the fatigued, each carried note lifting some baggage with it.
If ‘King Porus’ is the dawn of the album, Kinlaw is the birdsong. The guitar opens the track with an understated eeriness and is joined by a placid but tight drum groove, and for a brief moment everything shimmers as if sodden in dew before returning to the calm. Kinlaw assures us that “you have all you really need”, and her siren pierces through to make way for an extended passage of glossed cymbals, guitar chattering and imbued vocal acrobatics, all expanding alongside and within one another in a paradisiacal lull before everything relents to the wringing out. Everything gushes back out into life, each component delivered with a hazed passion and tied off with a most serene vocal melody. It never falters or plateaus, and without allowing itself to get sickly it decelerates to a quiet close.
Though this tactic, the spectral swelling and subsiding, is employed throughout the duration of MASS, enough is built in the way of atmospherics and tension to ensure its potency. On ‘Black Room Blues’, the eerie picked guitar continues to rear its head, and the group displays their knack for straying off the beaten path. The note progressions that your instincts as a listener expect to hear are fanned away in favour of disorientation and the peculiarity held in the half-awake posing of “breathless lover, can we stand in the ocean’s tide?”, and primed to drive home the fact as the guitar muddies is the thick lumber of a thudding beat. And whilst SoftSpot seem to be predisposed to engaging in the sonically dislodging, there are also moments where they brandish a penchant too for swirling melodies; ‘Pickup Lines’ is especially wrapped around its own sway, reaching a point of self-intoxication and utilising male backup vocals as if to ground the upwards spiral of Kinlaw’s vocalisation.
The brightest point of MASS is saved for the closing ‘The New York Times’, succinctly rounding things off with the group’s more jovial face. It’s a slightly cleaner delivery than the seven tracks before it even if it follows the same pattern of steadily accentuation, and its prettiness makes for an apt cap to the proceedings. Even if the changes over the course of the album – in pace and conviction and stature – are slight, when you begin to notice them you gain an appreciation of the wash, rinse and repeat. It’s not a clamoured, unmotivated complacency -- it’s a softly diligent exploration.
