Review Summary: running your hand over the piano keys
I've always wanted to make a movie. I thought it would be the coolest thing to match the images and stories I conjure up in my head to a moving picture. And the thread that navigates through every scene is "what music would go great with this?". I've even created playlists dedicated to certain emotional scenes I've created in my imagination. I always imagined it would be something sad and beautiful,
Lost In Translation meets
Eternal Sunshine. Images of a hazy summer field or a rainy, dimly lit city always running through my mind to tell a story of love lost yet how beautiful it was when it was happening.
There's a hefty chunk of music here on
Three Love Songs that would be perfect for my soundtrack. The ghost-like ambience of ethereal quality to this record is simultaneously heartbreaking and forgotten, like it was dug up from a distant memory. Even the inner monologue introduction sounds like someone retelling a dream or a moment of a time when the narrator remembers how it felt when his lover was around.
"I can hear you moving around downstairs, dragging your feet as you walked back and forth through the house, running your hands over the piano keys." is how
Three Love Songs begins on "There is only you in the light and nothing else", as the monologue gives way to someone or something actually moving their hands over a piano set.
Is the ghost recording this album, or is Ricky Eat Acid?
Three Love Songs is filled with these kinds of immersive moments, where reality and memory collide in a daydream-like realm that takes up the first half of the album. Ambient passages float along, one after another, as if the narrator is telling his story using the music as words. To a person not affiliated with context, the first half of
Three Love Songs may seem like a meandering exercise in playful experimentation, a decent but certainly not revelatory display of ambient musings. But to the patient listener, not only has
Three Love Songs been telling a vibrant, heartbreaking story, it has been building up to something extraordinary and creating foreboding tension.
"In my dreams we're almost touching" is where
Three Love Songs not only becomes something completely different, but seemingly wakes up from its own slumber. It is a perfectly paced and placed house music extravaganza, with a pulsing, driving beat and funky lasers being thrown around like a neon revolution. It's the sound of a record that has been carrying around the weight of the previous tracks' tension and sorrow forever on its back, and it has no choice but to break free from the chains of loss and explode into freedom. "In my dreams..." is that moment where you go "ohh,
now I see where this was heading" and it shows masterful pace, context, and flow on the part of Ricky Eat Acid. This is truly a record that is more than the sum of its parts, to be enjoyed from start to finish.
