We told you about Laish here. But in the meantime they published a new album, so we have to talk about them again. And it’s a pleasure to do it, because the new record of Danny Green, the exclusive owner of the company name, is yet another delight.

Let’s see… It starts with “The sand is shifting” and you can almost feel the sand slipping through your fingers. You can hear it in the guitar notes arpeggiated with a gentle hand and in the voice that seems to sing with the delicacy of someone who doesn’t want to wake the baby asleep in the next room. A piano, slight female countermelodies and discreet strings join with the same lightness. The balance is sublime and leads to the grainy notes of the guitar of “Love is Growing”, a beautifully melodious ballad that is worth three Coldplay records, if only ever Coldplay possessed such a sense of the extent to which parsimony takes nothing away from heartbreak. Another perfect shot, in short, but let’s move on. Then it’s up to “Listening for God” to continue the programme with almost country tones, a melody that is suitable for certain sunsets and a guitar that in a previous life was a pedal steel. The choral chorus opens in an almost gospel way, while maintaining its helpless fragility. The journey continues with “Blink of an eye”, a song that starts with a jaunty bluesy guitar, a sustained bass and an almost confidential voice; it continues with the entrance of the organ and a guitar that reinforces its arpeggios, but does not lead to any refrain, remaining rather suspended in a game of voids and full, lying on a discreet and constant groove capable of creating a diffused positive vibration. In “Dance to the rhythm” the voice starts by itself, followed immediately after by female choirs and a pressing drumming. When you get to the chorus, you discover that you could sing it for hours with a stupid smile on your face. Then you get to the track that gives the album its name, “Time Elastic”, which in this article writer’s opinion is already a candidate to be one of the most beautiful songs of the year.

What about this track? In addition to the fact that any songwriter should study it by heart for the way the songwriter handles the torrential, obscure, enthralling and poetic lyrics, for the way the music conveys a sense of cyclic elasticity between alluvial verse and obsessive refrain, for the way the elements of the arrangement are juxtaposed with an extraordinary sense of measure that, without interruption, leads the song from the quietness of a stream to the clamour of a flooding river.

On the other hand, what better metaphor than the elasticity of time to describe the miracle of certain pop pieces in which time seems to give up its own flow and you could get lost for hours just in the folds of a refrain.

You can take a breath with the arpeggiated songwriting of “Devil’s advocate”, strong with a timeless melody (but where the hell does good Danny get all these melodic lines so immediately recognisable that they seem to have always existed?), but also with strings that burst into the piece without weighing it down and marvellously blend in with the twists of the guitar and the falsettos of the voice. “University” boasts a crooner singing and dynamic strings, indebted to the sugary soul of the Motown brand, in a piece that Neil Shannon of Divine Comedy has been unable to write for some years now.

“I would prefer not to” is the most fragile and delicate episode of the album, played on the tip of a pick and whispered by a voice that seems to sing only for itself. The closing, finally, is entrusted to “The Fox” that starts slowly and poignantly with a melody that could belong to the very first Belle & Sebastian, but then fills majestically and poignantly with winds, strings and everything else to create a magnificence that lies in the ability to dose, rather than in the impact of the sound.

Here are the ten new songs by Danny Green. I wanted to mention them one by one because what we are talking about is a record of songs. No special effects, no daring sound operations. It’s a simple collection of almost perfect songs. Nothing more, nothing less. 

By Dixon

Originally published on June, 21 2018