Ben Howard first burst onto the scene in the early 2010s, during the sudden spike in demand for singer-songwriters that followed the success of a certain bespectacled ginger bloke. Howard’s debut album, Every Kingdom, saw him bring home Brit awards for not only the best breakthrough artist but also best male artist, as well as being nominated for the prestigious Mercury Prize. However, this new found fame and the weight of expectation that was on him to replicate his popular debut began to take their toll on the reluctant star. 2012’s The Burgh Island EP was a significant departure from the music of his first album, as Howard turned away from the radio-friendly sound that had made him successful and ventured down a more sombre route. That EP also laid the groundwork for his stellar sophomore album, I Forget Where We Were. Released in 2014, it was a far more ambitious affair than its predecessor. Where the first album was a brand of warm fingerpicked folk perfect for long summer days and campfire singalongs, its successor, written over the course of a long and bleak winter in Devon, was dark, atmospheric and experimental. I Forget Where We Were, lovingly crafted and perfectly realised, is a testament to Howard’s growth as a musician. It is deeply melodic and replete with gorgeous textures and distorted, echoing electric guitars that dissolve into the nebulous gloom.

As an album, I Forget Where We Were feels confessional and bare, like you’re listening in to a 4am conversation between lovers in a dimly lit kitchen. I suppose in a way, you are, because at its heart this album revolves around a crumbling relationship, and the feelings of sorrow and of guilt, of regret and of hopelessness that dwell in love’s twilight. The gorgeous title track is one of the album’s best songs. Howard’s voice is plaintive over echoing guitar as he lapses in and out of focus. There’s a domesticity to the scene, as he struggles to tear his attention away from the television so that he can respond to his lover standing in the kitchen:

Oh hey, I wasn’t listening I was watching Syria Blinded by the sunshine strip And you, you were in the kitchen Oh your mariner’s mouth The wounded with the wounder’s whip

In its final minute the song erupts into a chaotic crescendo of crashing cymbals and guitar harmonics before subsiding again over these lines that drip with uncertainty and regret: ‘That’s how summer passed: the great dividing range, the green, green, grass / And oh, maybe it was peace at last / Who knew’. His depiction of human emotion on the slow and aching ‘The End of the Affair’, is also hauntingly beautiful. All fingerpicked and reverb drenched guitar, Howard effortlessly captures the pain of a break-up in its ‘fumbled words’, the jealousy, and in his depiction of her laughter which echoes still in the hallways of his home, ‘the weight of your laughter / Alive in the hall’ so debilitating that it is attributed an almost physical presence which weighs on him. Then, in its second half, the song explodes into frantic guitar, echoing bass and desperate yells. The pain and the anger, the sense of betrayal is tangible in Howard’s voice. It resonates deep within you. There is something elemental in it, an overwhelming rawness and honesty that cannot but leave you moved.

And yet, although this album feels indisputably intimate, what sets it apart from other singer-songwriters is that it also manages to feel incredibly expansive without ever sacrificing its honesty or intimacy. The record seems to play out against a vast, looming blackness that conjures up both the vastness of space but also somehow the inside of one’s own head. Howard’s virtuoso and creative guitar playing creates beautiful sonic textures which ring out against this immutable darkness, suspended in its endless space and echoing guitar lines shoot off to vanish in the gloom. It is hard to capture the effect with words. There is also something of the ocean in the music. Most of the tracks are over 5 minutes long allowing them to ebb and flow, or to build to cresting apogees in such a way as to suggest sea swells and tides. Being from Devon, the ocean plays a symbolic role to Ben Howard, a keen surfer – just watch the video for ‘Esmeralda’. The album itself flows beautifully with the tracks all capturing the darker tone well and yet also managing to sound different and distinct which is sometimes the difficulty for an artist on these moodier works. Even the slightly weaker album tracks like the gloomy ‘Evergreen’, or the blues influenced ‘She Treats Me Well’ succeed in providing variety.

There are so many breathtaking moments across the album, such as the chaotic build of ‘Small Things’ or the racing ‘Rivers In Your Mouth’. On the swirling ‘Time is Dancing’ the driving rhythm melds wonderfully with the earnest, almost pleading vocals as Howard acknowledges his own role in the breakdown of their relationship. He asks his lover to put their concerns and arguments aside and to dance with him. Here, his awareness of life’s ephemerality, rather than being debilitating, instead seems to impart a sense of urgency to the song as he implores her to ‘Hold it in dear, let’s go dancing, / I do believe we’re only passing through’. The lilting and tender Conrad is another beautiful moment as minimalist guitar rises and falls like waves. It addresses the resignation and realisation that no matter how hard we try we cannot stop ourselves from losing those we love with these gorgeous if heart-wrenching lines:

Oh I loved you with the good And the careless of me But it all goes back

This same feeling of powerlessness permeates the whole album. On ‘Rivers in your Mouths’, Howard admits that he begged ‘for the world to change / But it don’t / No it ain’t all you and that’s the thing’ while on ‘In Dreams’ he admits to being ‘gracious in defeat’. Once again on ‘Conrad’, Howard acknowledges his inability to change things singing ‘we will never be the change / to the weather and the sea and you knew that’. Somehow, this album is about accepting, or refusing to accept, the things that we cannot change, with Howard oscillating wildly between these two positions in turn resigned to or raging against this realisation. If we had had any hope of resolution or redemption, these are firmly dashed in the closing track, with its title telling us all we need to know. With a sense of urgency, he begs for absolution:

My fear in lights All I said comes home I can’t do this alone Hold me down Was I born to lie? Now prove me wrong Prove me wrong

Desperately, he asks to be proven wrong, and yet the only answer he receives, that he gives himself is ‘But it’s in your nature / Blooms inside your blood / Hold me in harm’s way baby’ before the album and any sense of hope collapses in that irrevocable final line: ‘All is now harmed’.

Best songs: Small Things, I Forget Where We Were, Time Is Dancing, Conrad, The End of the Affair

Best moment: The 4 and a half minute mark in Time is Dancing when the song seems to stop and then suddenly springs back into life

By Sebastian Cray

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