Adrian Crowley
When You Are Here You Are Family

This album feels suspended. Suspended in a soft limbo made of sea, mist, and waves of memories crashing against the cliffs of memory. Silky and dense sounds like the malt of an Irish Whiskey to drown another starless evening. This is the world Adrian Crowley sings about, hailing from Galway, Ireland. A world of inner ghosts, of universal and timeless sadness that accompanies you every step like an intangible shadow from which you cannot, and perhaps do not want to, separate. A challenging album, not one to be appreciated immediately. An album that, conversely, leaves you from the very first listen with an undefined bitterness, a pervasive and intangible discomfort, as if something in these tracks never quite sounds right. But not due to an error. On the contrary, due to a precise stylistic dictate. Almost a poetics of uncertainty, of precariousness.

Ten delicate and melancholic tracks float on the sound of an omnipresent cello, of a guitar that at times sounds obsessive, at times fragile and delicate like a child throwing a tantrum. But above all with Crowley's voice. Slender, plaintive, extremely fragile, intangibly imperfect. A voice that carries within itself all the lessons of Nick Drake and Will Oldham. And their desperate and obsessive mood in the relentless search for meaning. Crowley sings the same song over and over. Each track is nothing but a "variatio" of the previous one. Nothing more. Everything revolves, like a fulcrum, around an incurable existential pain, yet full of life. Illuminated without warmth as if by an aurora borealis by Katy Ellis's cello. And by the extraordinary drumming of Thomas Haugh, a true warm and pulsating heart hidden beneath a cold and shivering skin. Thus, to the airy melancholy of "Only Daughter / Sweet Sorrow," a very delicate manifesto of human fragility (I follow my weakness, makes me strong), contrasts with the dreamlike and hallucinatory scene of the splendid and nocturnal "Girl From The Estuary," certainly the most successful track of the album. Where the night is "starless, starless, starless and black." But where dreams become a woman, a woman whose body is pure light. Light in which the man, drunk, drowns his song and solitude in endless, immeasurable peace.