Sunny Intervals: Swept Away
(Self Launched)
Obtain/Streaming
Out Now
Visitor reviewer, Jonathan Shipley of Assistant listens to Swept Away, the latest launch from Sunny Intervals for LTW.
Sunny Intervals is the challenge of ex-Pocketbooks bandleader Andy Hudson, who’s new (self-released) album Swept Away is likely one of the finest issues I’ve heard in a very long time. Since 2012 Andy has been quietly (i.e., under my shallow radar) releasing albums of splendid, literate indie pop all of that are richly populated with songs to treasure. They’re above all else powered by the seasons – significantly spring and summer season – and preoccupied with the passing of time, the importance of remoted moments and the on a regular basis objects that give them weight. Throughout 4 albums now his gentle, fantastically organized songs – breathlessly populated with lengthy runs of phrases and ornate instrumental prospers – have charted inner climate with exterior cues: the primary indicators of spring, the “two for one seaside towels and low-cost parasols” of summer season. Swept Away – his first file in eight years – feels like a basic to my ears.
Hudson can’t assist however populate his songs with particulars – he has the songwriter’s equal of a photographic reminiscence, adorning his songs with vivid visible clues. On his debut, 2012’s pretty, romantic, Rooftops, the imagery explores a variety of shared moments within the fashionable metropolis – conferences on hearth escape stairs, rooftop bars, views throughout Blackfriars Pier. 2014’s Step Into Spring, in the meantime, is an album of perpetual movement, of transport as a type of theatre wherein a roll name of buses, ferries, cable automobiles, carousels and rowing boats ship the songwriter exactly nowhere, “with a single oar to row towards the tide”. On 2016’s Dawn the world appears just a little extra turbulent nonetheless: we meet spinning dancers, damaged musical devices, situations of surreal climate, and landscapes that blur into dream sequences. Every music is full of sensory particulars, from home windows rattling “like gentle tambourines” to a salsa crimson marriage ceremony outfit which “clashed with the flowers”. The sensation is of a world which is dashing up; a sense which accelerates on Swept Away to the purpose the place it typically feels that Andy is simply watching the world fizz previous, faintly astonished.
For a person who has written many phrases on summer-readiness, Ready For Sunshine finds him caught on the hop, too preoccupied with the state of the world to have organized his “field contemporary trainers” and began to get pleasure from himself. What does an expression of pleasure even imply, he desires to know, in 2025? Aren’t we simply information to be measured? “Strongly agree”, he sings – discovering an irrepressible melody – “considerably disagree, someplace inbetween / It’s all related, statistically important to somebody / To someone someplace”. There’s a way of the narrator ready for greater than sunshine – what’s actually wanted is that means. “I have to kind myself out”, Andy sings, as he’s pressured into the unwelcome function of bystander moderately than participant. “I’m on the fence, really feel detached, positively impartial / Feeling barely sick of all of it”.
How cautious and musical the preparations are on this file. Hudson’s palette is constructed from a sparsely chosen vary of textures; rhythmic guitar choosing, twinkling pianos, bursts of orchestral element and the sometimes tinny beat. I’m reminded most of Darren Hayman, Kings of Comfort and Blur, however continuously the songs spiral right into a fragile, delirious stomp which most recollects the ecstatic sweep of Motown or Northern Soul, or within the case of showstoppers The Blink of An Eye and Draw The Curtains, Paul Weller’s Model Council-era blue eyed soul balladry.
A lot of Swept Away issues melancholy moments of isolation and corresponding situations of eager for belonging. Summer time Attracts In and Misplaced and Discovered are each fretfully preoccupied with impermanence, the place each an excellent summer season and a brand new romance are haunted by the inevitability of their ending: “Trip romances and summer season encounters / doused just like the charcoals on barbecue units”. On ‘Ready for Sunshine’ “the tide is available in so quick however then it simply rolls slowly out”. All the pieces modifications, nothing is definite: “I don’t know the way the story ends / I don’t know if the arc goes to interrupt / or simply bend”.
Maybe the album’s most revealing lyric opens ‘Electromagnetic’: “I is likely to be overthinking this, however…”, Andy discloses. I empathise with the admission. On The Blink Of An Eye, Andy’s eye for particulars accretes, recording not simply the furnishings of life (“the shutter sound in your cell phone / spare raincoats and sneakers by the door”) but in addition its absences, the “empty area on the tables and chairs”. On Misplaced & Discovered Andy observes “I can see in quick ahead, of late / at a 1.8 pace price”. The main points of life can overwhelm. Particularly if one feels dislocated, hypersensitive to patterns, timelines, particulars, emotional nuance. Overthinking all the things.
One Final Day of the Holidays is wonderful, and hits me exhausting, listening to the album for the tenth time in per week on the final day of my very own journey to France again in Could; a vacation on which I struggled to calm down for the primary few days as a result of I used to be worrying about work and my dad and mom (one in every of whom had a stroke whereas we drove residence). My goodness, don’t everyone knows that sense of loss that comes with the realisation that our holidays are practically over! “I simply want one final day of the vacations / one final day of the vacations / I’ll be prepared / Yet another open air bus tour / one final form on the dancefloor”. After all, Andy doesn’t fairly escape the sense that he’s residing on borrowed time, however the music shimmers with the enjoyment of a well-earned break from temporal overwhelm – remodeled, “super-elevated” by the expertise of unstructured time. All of us want extra of that.
I’m in love with this file. In Synchronised, Andy will get just a little extra reduction: he catches sight of an unspecified ‘you’ within the fragmented, flash-lit freeze-frames of the dancefloor (“I catch your eyes / Dilating within the darkness / Reflecting within the accent lights”) and revels within the second of concord: “Hypnotised / Synchronised with one another each time”.
Electromagnetic tells the entire story. “I’m simply operating round in circles / Carried on the waves / The daylight within the clearing / And the phrases leaping from the web page / The readability is fleeting then it’s gone / Softly swept away / Second guessing all the things / Pulling on the slightest thread”. The emotional motion-sickness, the delicate flashes of perception, the compulsion to overanalyse. Chasing that means in indicators that vanish as quickly as they arrive.
Draw The Curtains, inevitably, brings issues to a detailed. Winter has arrived. Given all of the mentions of summer season throughout Sunny Intervals’ data, I wish to ask Andy what he thinks of winter, however I get a way of it right here. The tide heads slowly again out. “And I’ll draw the curtains and silence the telephone”, he sings, “cancel the milk and the pay as you go”. A shifting, lilting piano fugue, reflective and crystalline, ebbs and flows. It’s astoundingly stunning, wistful and tender.
Thank goodness the nice climate will likely be again once more – I would like Andy again on the planet, catching rays, fretting, itemising hypermarket cabinets, traversing the tramways, writing extra good songs.
I actually hope we received’t have to attend eight years for his subsequent LP.
Sunny Intervals might be discovered on Bluesky, Instagram and Bandcamp
Picture Equipped by Andy Hudson / Sunny Intervals
Visitor reviewer Jonathan Shipley is a member of the band Assistant and publishes the fanzine In The April Solar which is offered through Bandcamp
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