AEM102 Shai Erlichman

Every­thing about Shai Erlichman’s lat­est release, the Sea­son Of Increas­ing Light EP, is suf­fused with dreamy, warm light, like a washed out old pho­to­graph of some­one back­lit by the sun in a for­got­ten sum­mer­time liv­ing room. From the title to the hope­ful lyrics to the spa­cious open arrange­ments and gen­er­ous (but not too gen­er­ous) reverb, the EP’s four songs glit­ter with warmth and an energy that remains simul­ta­ne­ously relaxed and con­trolled. Recorded live in a room (more bands do this please) by Greg Beson of Man­ners at the White­haus art col­lec­tive in Jamaica Plain, MA, these record­ings are one of the best exam­ples of match­ing aural tex­ture to song­writ­ing that I’ve ever heard. The muted, mallet-struck drums (Mickey O’Hara) and gen­tly reverbed gui­tars and keys (Jake Est­ner & Adam Cogge­shall, respec­tively) pro­vide a per­fectly expan­sive, airy back­drop for Erlichman’s songs, which are catchy and har­mo­nious, like all great pop songs, but rig­or­ously min­i­mal and stripped down to their absolute cores. The spa­cious feel­ing this min­i­mal­ism imparts to the songs is cru­cial to their relaxed, sun-faded beauty, and con­trary to what you might think, mak­ing music this sim­ple and beau­ti­ful is incred­i­bly difficult.

(Note: the descrip­tors in this piece might call to mind a lot of recent blog-hyped, lo-fi, sum­mery rock music; think of Erlichman’s music as what those bands would sound like if you could actu­ally hear their songs through the cav­ernous reverb…and if they wrote good songs).

With that lo-fi crowd Erlich­man shares an admirable lack of overblown or maudlin moments, but unlike the sloppy loose­ness of those bands, noth­ing on this record­ing is extra­ne­ous or with­out intent. He uses a dynamic trick I’ve seen a num­ber of times lately (most effec­tively and recently in Twin Sister’s music, both live and recorded), and one I think more bands would be wise to adopt: rather than start­ing out at a deaf­en­ing vol­ume with every­one play­ing full blast and then attempt­ing to some­how top that at the cli­max of each song, he low­ers the entire dynamic and den­sity level of his set to allow the shape of the songs to emerge pow­er­fully and nat­u­rally. It’s so effec­tive, espe­cially on a song like A-side “Morn­ings When”, which starts out with a stark, dron­ing five-note gui­tar riff over which a hyp­notic and asym­met­ri­cal melody slowly unfurls. The first third of the song con­sists only of vocal vari­a­tions over this riff (Erlich­man has an amaz­ing abil­ity to gen­er­ate end­less melodies over the sim­plest back­drops), even­tu­ally backed by a gen­tle mal­let back­beat and some float­ing key­board and gui­tar drones. When the song finally breaks into a turn­around, it only lasts for two bars before return­ing us to where we started, build­ing ten­sion slowly and lux­u­ri­ously. The gor­geous and brief cli­max occurs over a sec­ond repeat­ing gui­tar fig­ure, over which O’Hara’s drums play time only on the first half, leav­ing the sec­ond half sus­pended in shim­mer­ing cym­bal rolls like dust motes float­ing in the morn­ing light. It’s a ges­ture of restraint that per­fectly suits the song. If the drums had played a back­beat over the whole sec­tion, you’d never have noticed any­thing amiss, but this ges­ture of removal is so much more orig­i­nal than any addi­tion could be. It lets the song breathe, even as the vocals explode into a high, open har­mony on the words there are and then slowly recede into a third ele­gantly sim­ple gui­tar riff.

Erlichman’s lyrics, often com­posed sim­ply by impro­vis­ing until some­thing sticks, are oblique and non-linear, as you might expect from lyrics com­posed that way, but they’re not at all throw­aways. They evoke unusual and del­i­cate moods, moods you never would have thought could be the cen­ter­piece of a deeply mov­ing song. “Morn­ings When” finds him sit­ting at his kitchen table watch­ing the morn­ing sun­light pour in through the win­dow, hav­ing a sim­ple break­fast, and it man­ages to express the  won­der­ful plea­sure of sim­ple things like eat­ing alone in sunny kitchens (encap­su­lated in the beau­ti­ful line I will sit and feel what belongs), a plea­sure that is insep­a­ra­ble from its own tran­sience (the line I will sit and feel what is gone). It’s a small moment that’s enor­mous in feeling.

B-side “The Sea­son” adds to the hazy gui­tars and sparse drums a pleas­ant rhyth­mic ten­sion between 6/8 and 4/4 (notice that the drum part often gen­tly fights against the triplets in the gui­tar by play­ing what sounds like a straight back­beat) and a darker tone. Some­how, against the minor key arpeg­gios of Erlichman’s gui­tar, the lines every­one, every­one is happy / and every­one, every­one is needed sound ironic (in the tra­di­tional sense of the word, not the trucker hat sense), and some­thing about the way the lyri­cal sen­tences never seem to end, run­ning on and on and then trail­ing off mid clause at the end of both the first cho­rus and sec­ond verse, gives the song an omi­nous feel­ing like a day where the heat com­ing off the side­walk is so intense it dis­torts the air. A lyric like the can­ni­bal claws of super applause will have me reveals all the assets of Erlichman’s stream of con­scious­ness style of writ­ing. The rhythm of the words is beau­ti­ful, and while I can guess at what they might mean, there is some­thing chill­ingly mys­te­ri­ous about the phrase that you never quite get with more straight­for­ward lyrics. Like “Morn­ings When”, the dynamic cli­max to the song is brief (mak­ing use of that same tech­nique I men­tioned ear­lier): the words like a howled out up an octave before the song dis­si­pates. Note the sim­plic­ity of Estner’s tremolo gui­tar here, which pro­vides a min­i­mal but essen­tial coun­ter­point to the vocal melody, espe­cially dur­ing the louder sec­ond verse and the final cho­rus, where it plays a gen­tly descend­ing figure.

The songs on Sea­son of Increas­ing Light, like much of my favorite music, reveal them­selves slowly and gen­tly, over the course of many lis­tens. Their restrained beauty and sub­tle opti­mism gets bet­ter and bet­ter with rep­e­ti­tion. The other side of that coin is that you should prob­a­bly sit and lis­ten to these songs once or twice with­out send­ing that gchat mes­sage or read­ing that mes­sage­board beef (or, uh, this arti­cle). It’s sum­mer now; I advise you to load these songs on your portable audio device of choice and take a walk out in the sea­son of increas­ing light. It’s the per­fect set­ting for these del­i­cate, hazy heart-swelling songs.

Gabe Birn­baum

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