Album Review : Patrick Kelleher - You Look Cold
- Written by Rory Gibb
Once in a while a record emerges, often unexpectedly, that is so well sequenced and coherent that it forms a mass almost impossible to separate individual segments from without doing the music contained within a disservice. As a general rule these albums come from artists far beneath the surface of public consciousness; away from the hype-everything eyes of the popular music press and the blogosphere it remains possible to work refreshingly free from expectation, and in doing so take time to make something that holds together admirably.
Dubliner Patrick Kelleher’s debut is one such record. Which is not to ignore that there are highlights and lowlights across its length, but what impresses about You Look Cold is its overall aura and atmosphere, even after only a single cursory listen. It is also distinctly a debut album, both in terms of its lo-fi bedroom style recording and the carefully honed manner of his songwriting style.
In a similar manner to that of his American contemporaries Panda Bearand (to a lesser extent) Atlas Sound, Kelleher’s music is diffuse and pleasingly intangible; like a soluble vitamin tablet dropped into a glass of water individual songs effervesce momentarily before dissipating, the clouds of static interference that shroud his voice leaving soft vapour trails in the wake of each syllable. To draw further parallels, ‘Finds You’ shares a common feral energy with early Animal Collective, his disembodied shrieks almost threatening to shatter entirely its glassy surface, and the carousel melodies of ‘Coat To Wear’ start whimsical and gradually decay to a nightmarish dissonance to match its lyrical chill. Throughout, Kelleher excels at wringing the sinister from the pretty, as starry music box melodies are underpinned by industrial clangs and the sense of tension ratchets through the psych-fuzz of ‘Blue Eyes’; by the end of its four minute drone it begins to spin ever faster like an out-of-control fairground ride to an awkward, juddering halt.
In pleasantly contrary fashion, the record’s most straightforward pop moment is also its last. ‘Look, I Wore A Tie!’ is immediately striking in its simplicity and straightforwardness – previous journalistic comparisons to Owen Pallett are more immediately justifiable here than elsewhere, both in Kelleher’s vocal tics and his knack for arrangement. It’s an appropriate way to close an incredibly listenable album, and one which seems to have cleverly sidestepped the increasing demands of the shuffle generation for instantly consumable pop nuggets by making each song an integral part of the whole.
Six weeks or so after I first heard it, You Look Cold’s frosty charms have continued to sink into my skin. This month, The Wire published an article on their newly coined genre term, ‘hypnagogic pop’ – a typically impenetrable name which refers to the state the brain reaches in the few moments before sleep sets in fully. During this time the brain starts to free associate, becoming incredibly lucid, yet if you were to return to a fully awake state immediately afterward these associations would be almost impossible to remember and even harder to make sense of. Although The Wire have used the term to describe the post-post-everything miasma of bands like The Skaters and Pocahaunted – not exactly Kelleher’s closest contemporaries – I like the term in reference to his music, a peculiar mix of simple folk melody and an aquatic vagueness mimicking that awake-not-awake state of consciousness. I think I’ll find myself returning to You Look Cold quite a lot.