Songs from Another Life / Steve Kilbey & Gareth Koch

I read a lovely review of this album by someone very knowledgeable in music matters, and then this morning I bought myself these songs from another life on iTunes. Oh! The beauty! They seem to have sucked up the air out of dried up music remnants and made it spiral again around the instruments. And they became a 21st-century relic, moulded by music spirits that stay around for ever. It’s one for the ears to luxuriate in. The guitars so limpid and clear. They turn the smallest, dark, vestigial trace into a vast sea of sound, becoming luminous again. And the voice of Steve Kilbey – which I have never heard this beautiful – makes any mystery sound intelligible, emboldens our soul to accept the miracle of music. I am drawn to the impossible question Stefan asks in his review: ‘Where does musical imagination start?’ It seems to have been around for ever, circling around through time. 

‘The Nereid’ is one of my favourite songs of this life, with its eternal, pining question ‘What would it take to change her mind?’… in a corporeal and voluptuous, pleading dance of guitars and percussion, while the voice stays in a timid languor (I adore this song!). ‘So We Pray’, sung in an almost trembling voice, foresees the gloomy outcome of life’s destructive drives, Eros and Thanatos, life’s eternal balancing between love and conflict. A momentous song. There are other moments of lush decadence, sensuousness, fight and prayer; the album has raw and fierce, essential poetry,- sometimes softened by a honey-like sweetness -, all the drama of a world where humans live, no matter where or when. It has the strength and conviction of a past that has nothing to prove and lingers around for ever, showing us that just having been is more than enough..

The music and the voice know and forgive everything and everyone. With tender compassion, they never condemn. Sometimes I think that music understands our world (ourselves included) best of all. It has neither past nor future tense.

This album really comes very highly recommended!

Joke Roelandt, December 2021