Monday, October 1st, 2012

Azure Ray – Scattered Like Leaves

From Birmingham. No, the one in Alabama.


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Alfred Soto: Of course I confused them for Fever Ray — wouldn’t you? Except this “dream pop” act puts the histrionics into the depths of their longing instead of into their singing.
[5]

Anthony Easton: The few times I have listened to it, I have tried to work out how substantial it is, and if it is not very substantial if that is a virtue or a vice. I think that it has the materialism of ectoplasm–think Spiritualist and not Ghost Buster, which I can like. 
[6]

Brad Shoup: Had this going in two tabs and it sounded amazing. Crowded the soundscape, putting Taylor & Fink’s vocals into the realm of muttering forest wanderers. The recurring Zimmerblat is an unfortunate dip into fashionable darkness, but they’ve always been magnificent at rendering peace on an internal scale, so the ambiguous chorus “there’s love everywhere/there’s sadness everywhere/so I keep movin’,” so patiently articulated in classic Azure Ray style, gives me something to hold.
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Iain Mew: I hadn’t heard Azure Ray before. I had to double check that this wasn’t a particularly dreamy St. Vincent song and half expected a vicious guitar solo to rip through it. Nothing ever does disrupt its mood even slightly though. I admire anyone that can take “there’s love everywhere” and sound so unhappy about it, but the drifting is too disconnected to move much. 
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: They had me up until “there’s love everywhere.” Come on. That is clearly not the case.
[6]

Patrick St. Michel: When you start a song off with the heady line “If you could guess how the world will end,” the music needs to match the disoriented mood that would lead to a sentence like that in the first place.  Azure Ray manage just that with the minimal, swirly backdrop on “Scattered Like Leaves,” everything sounding just blurred enough to match lyrics like “when you’re out at the bar/and everyone looks like someone that you used to know.”  This isn’t a totally confused track, though.  Despite sounding woozy, this song is all about trudging forward through the confusion and holding onto basic truths (“there’s love everywhere/there’s sadness everywhere”) to keep you moving on.  It’s a dreamy song that urges you to snap out of it.
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