Gentle Stranger – Inner Winter (2023)    


Review:
…The music of Gentle Stranger is the kind that seems to tap into something elemental, a band who are not so much without a genre, but operating at a level where the very idea of genre is anathema; they make music purely as is required. If that means stupidity and chaos, as it did last summer, so be it. If every ounce of that needs to be abandoned in favour of the total starkness of Inner Winter, so be it. And this, tonally, is a record defined by starkness, by distant field recordings, melancholy drones, acoustic guitars and plaintive vocals. Lyrics are stripped of all irony, appearing as either simple and unadorned statements, or as beautiful and meandering stories, like ‘Two to Carry’, one of a number of songs featuring guest vocalist Martha Skye Murphy. This, then, is a ‘winter’ album in the purest sense. Gentle Stranger augment it with seasonal tropes, the distant sleigh bells amid the creaking field recording that makes up ‘(searching in the snow)’, for instance. This, crucially, is a record that ultimately depicts an inner winter, more than an outer one. It takes wider themes one associates with the season – of hibernation, transition, and particularly death – that, depending on one’s mental state and lived experiences, can arise at any time. ‘Kestrel’ (which, notably, was previously released in an entirely different and less wintery form for 2020’s Love and Unlearn) narrates the story of a sick bird that Hardwick-Allan was ultimately unable to nurse back to health. It is not hard to extract a deep sense of grief from the record’s title track, either. “Lately I’ve been wishing I was deep underground,” Hardwick-Allan sings to sparse acoustic guitar. The way they staged the listening playback at The Horse Hospital, as shadow people, hiding away under bedsheets in the basement, feels notable, as does the imagery of an accompanying video for ‘Kestrel/Inner Winter’, where Hardwick-Allan and McKenzie are painted pale and corpselike, letting themselves be buried in the artificial snow. The music on Inner Winter delves often into territory befitting these transitional and unknowable inner spaces between life and death, consciousness and hibernation, grief and clarity. Some sounds in the field recordings are familiar – voices, crackling static – and yet are just slightly obfuscated, pushed out of reach as if delivered in a dream. When viewing Inner Winter from the outside rather than inhabiting it, it can be like seeing a loved one in a mire of depression whose communication is sluggish and blunted. And yet, the communication is still there; flickers of openness and communion like those lyrics projected onto the side of the bedsheets. The video for ‘Kestrel/Inner Winter’ is a mixture of that aforementioned deathly imagery, and behind the scenes footage showing the band and their collaborators as they go through the simple intimacy of artistic creation. Then, there is the last song on the album, ‘Love Me Like That’, where Gentle Stranger emerge entirely from their cocoon and join a choir of friends and collaborators who sing a titular refrain – “Come on, love me like that” – again and again, to no fixed rhythm or melody, ending only when this occurs naturally, in a manner akin to Gaelic devotional psalm singing. — by Patrick Clarke on Quietus


   


Track List:
01 - (engine in the snow)
02 - Two to Carry
03 - (searching in the snow)
04 - Kestrel
05 - Inner Winter
06 - (angel in the snow)
07 - Love Me Like That


Media Report:
Genre: dream-pop, experimental
Country: London, UK
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)


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