New music from Living Hour, Ben Eshbach
Living Hour
Lovely, Lonely
(thehours.bandcamp.com)
Perhaps the release date of the new Living Hour EP Lovely, Lonely was strategically timed to come a few weeks after Valentine’s Day, being subtitled “A Collection of Covers for Hollow Hearts”; while prevailing attitudes around that holiday are either unabashedly romantic or bitterly anti-romantic, the mood on this EP seems to predominantly be one of wistful defeat and peaceful, contemplative acceptance.
The opening track on the Winnipeg, Canada band’s self-released EP is a gorgeous cover of Françoise Hardy’s first hit—and one of her most recognized and beloved tracks—“Tous les garçons et les filles,” featuring intertwined guitar lines, brush-struck drums and cymbals, and lead singer Sam Sarty’s lovely, floating vocals. There’s an atmospheric haze with occasional muffled yet softly devastating guitar bursts, like chocolates that burst with cherry syrup as they’re bitten.
The second track, a cover of “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” (made famous by The Ink Spots’ 1941 version), is the EP’s highlight and a rendition that this writer just can’t seem to get out of his head. It evokes a western feel with an easygoing cowboy guitar swagger in 6/8 time and a relaxed, measured pace.
Thematically, it’s an exception on the EP, with modest and optimistic romantic intentions instead of defeat, as Sarty sings, “I just want to start a flame in your heart.” In the track’s middle section, various random snippets of people’s conversations are puzzlingly added, including one mentioning eggplant parmesan and another, saying, “Procrastination is one of our greatest faults.”
Next is a dreamy cover of Avi Buffalo’s “Overwhelmed with Pride,” which tempers the song, about a bigheaded protagonist whose internal conflict is ostensibly minuscule in the grand scheme of things—“I’m relatively, inconspicuously overwhelmed with pride.” It’s followed by a brief, trifle of a piano instrumental, “For Nico,” which leads to the oft-covered Jackson Browne song “These Days,” with Nico’s cover being the gold standard and most admired rendition.
Living Hour covers it as an understated piano ballad, with Sarty singing with her exposed, clear voice, without vibrato; its loose tempo adds to a despairing nature, as she sings, “I had a lover / I don’t think I’d risk another these days.”
At one point, the piano takes over and dominates with its unexpected patterns, and the melody diverges and wanders from the expected path at the end, as Sarty heartbreakingly concludes, “Please don’t confront me with my failures / I haven’t forgotten them.”
Ben Eshbach
Bells Through the Leaves
(beneshbach.bandcamp.com)
The enduring music of Claude Debussy can be exquisitely arresting, glisteningly sensual and even jaunty, and at its most stunning, it can give the listener the shivers coupled with a sense of profound calmness.
Being part of the modern classical canon, there’s no shortage of interpretations of his work, and many of his piano pieces have been adapted for other instruments, including the guitar; however, while a YouTube search reveals numerous nylon-string classical guitar performances of Debussy’s pieces, electric guitar adaptations aren’t so common.
Perhaps unexpectedly, Ben Eshbach—best known as a member of the California pop/rock band The Sugarplastic—took inspiration for his new album Bells Through the Leaves, comprised of Debussy compositions performed on electric guitar, from Isao Tomita’s 1974 album Snowflakes Are Dancing, which covered Debussy on synthesizers.
Eshbach’s playing on the breathtaking opener, “Arabesque no. 1,” is expressive with its various forms of movement—as the elegant runs rise and fall in pitch, Eshbach both eases and pushes the tempo, and on the recording, the notes gently bounce between the left and right channels, making for compelling listening on headphones.
Eshbach’s tone is clean and bright, with a little reverb for a cozy warmth, and guitar effects are used very sparingly, like some delay effects on “Clair de lune” and a tremolo effect on part of “En bateau.”
While Eshbach’s arrangements are faithful to the piano pieces, he takes advantages of the particulars of the guitar, using string bends, harmonics, slides and other techniques. “Cloches à travers les feuilles” (“Bells Through the Leaves”) and “Clair de lune” are perfect tracks for peering into a snowglobe, with certain high notes almost sounding like a celesta.
Eshbach tackles Debussy’s playful ragtime diversion “Golliwogg’s Cakewalk” with the requisite vigor, and the album ends perhaps fittingly with a popular encore piece, “La fille aux cheveux de lin” (“The Girl with the Flaxen Hair”), a sonic daydream that concludes an album that revisits familiar tunes with a welcome freshness and high technical proficiency.