(2021) You'll Never Get to Heaven - Wave Your Moonlight Hat for the Snowfall Train EP  


Review:
You’ll Never Get to Heaven’s lucid dream-pop rarely coalesces into recognizable shapes. “We are intuitively drawn to music that occupies a space between intimacy and distance,” says Chuck Blazevic, who shares the duo with his partner, the classically trained pianist, violinist, and vocalist Alice Hansen. Across four releases in just under a decade, the London, Ontario-based couple have developed a strain of ambient songcraft as instrumentally sophisticated as it is hazily mysterious. On Wave Your Moonlight Hat for the Snowfall Train, they replace the drum machine pulse of 2017’s Images with a shimmering, vaporous sound. Inspired by the beatless, delay-drenched free jazz arrangements of Phil Yost’s 1967 LP Bent City (whose closing song provides the new album’s title), this softly atmospheric cycle feels both tenderly tactile and forever out of reach. From the start, YNGTH’s music has been intentionally incomplete. In a 2014 interview, Nova Scotian experimental musician and Divorce label founder Darcy Spidle recalled receiving the duo’s 2012 debut as a demo. When Spidle heard the sketchy, unfinished bedroom recordings of breath-on-glass pop, he offered to release the record as-is. Hansen has compared the origins of YNGTH to Leyland Kirby’s hauntological project The Caretaker: building songs with symphonic jazz samples from a bygone era to linger eternally in a ghost-filled ballroom. With a patient process that requires three or four years between releases, YNGTH have continually tweaked their time-suspending formula. The 2014 EP Adorn paid direct tribute to the duo’s influences with a cover of Cluster and Eno’s “By This River,” followed by a solo piano performance of Erik Satie’s “Enfantillages Pittoresques: Berceuse.” On Images—released by Maryland label Yellow K the year after Japanese Breakfast’s debut—YNGTH found a sputtering propulsion that resembled synth-pop, allowing Hansen’s soft, wistful vocal melodies to be tugged forward by analog and electronic beats. Wave Your Moonlight Hat continues their use of chiming metallophone percussion (also a feature of Blazevic’s solo project Slow Attack Ensemble), but in comparison to the duo’s previous output, it feels weightless. The eight songs of Wave Your Moonlight Hat are split between fragile vocal meditations and instrumentals as delicate as origami cranes. With poetic economy of words, Hansen uses natural imagery (a setting sun, a creeping dawn) and sound elements (an infinite echo dancing in and out of phase) to evoke spiraling emotions that never quite come into focus. On “Eye, Soul and Hand,” she lowers her voice to a muffled ASMR whisper, making it almost impossible to discern some of the album’s most affecting lyrics: “Fear is a pale gray shadow, and now that you’re gone it takes its form.” Even if she doesn’t reveal specifics, the world weighs heavy as it disintegrates around her. On previous releases, Blazevic has earned attention for his use of the Monome, a grid-based control panel of blinking squares that requires the user to define its function. For these songs, his primary tool is the fretless bass, which glides between grooves and punctuates Hansen’s vocal hooks with twinkling harmonics like Jaco Pastorius. Wave Your Moonlight Hat’s other core instruments include marimba and the watery, Grouper-like pianos that bob to the surface on closer “Predawn Visions.” The final effect is like Julee Cruise produced by Ivo Watts-Russell, or Elizabeth Fraser produced by Angelo Badalamenti. Four releases in, You’ll Never Get to Heaven have crafted a sound that is comforting and familiar but never predictable.





Track Listing:
1.Setting Sun 02:58
2.Pink and Gold and Blue 02:55
3.Dust 02:35
4.Pattern Waves 03:30
5.Eye, Soul and Hand 03:18
6.Mad Shadows 02:33
7.Eternal Present 02:59
8.Predawn Visions 02:27


Media Report:
Genre: dream-pop
Country: UK / Canada
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits