Ben Howard
Noonday Dream

The anticipation of something new, a turning point. The stasis that precedes the beginning of a new cycle, a new phase of one's existence, perhaps not equal to the one we left behind, or maybe even superior to it. As I highlighted in my previous review of "I Forget Where We Were", that album represented for me the rightful, albeit melancholic, conclusion of something, of a phase of one's life; "Noonday Dream" instead is the soundtrack of anticipation that accompanies the stasis and the sense of emptiness that follows such a conclusion. But beware! By stasis, I absolutely don't want to highlight a negative aspect of this album, which I consider truly excellent, even if certainly not up to its predecessor. Stasis, the sense of emptiness, and waiting, with all the hope but also the fear that derives from it, are necessary or at least inevitable moments in human existence, as I think this calm and reflective album is for Ben Howard's career. The album opens with "Nica Libres At Dusk", a song with a hypnotic and tension-filled verse that is followed by a liberating chorus, like a thought that torments us when we get up from bed, to which we then find a mature solution as the day progresses. It is followed by the relaxing, dreamy, and ethereal "Towing the Line", in my opinion, one of the melodic peaks of the artist, a song that from the first listen, even without knowing the lyrics, managed to move me. Here comes "A Boat To an Island On the Wall", the song that embodies anticipation par excellence. A calm piece, initially static, that evolves slowly until it engages the listener with a feeling of hope, like a day that brings, as it progresses, stimuli to a flat and dull awakening for facing the rest of it and expectations that could be fulfilled or not. The following songs ("What the Moon Does", "Someone In the Doorway", "The Defeat", and "There's Your Man") offer the same formula: stasis and anticipation that might explode at any moment into something existential as well as they might not, leaving us still for a few more days to walk up and down the streets of the world searching for something, even if we haven't yet quite figured out what. I would like to give an honorable mention to "A Boat To an Island, Pt.2 Agatha's Song", an almost ambient piece that, towards the end, releases the listener from the growing anticipation with a sweet and conciliatory melody and singing. With "Murmurations", after this timid journey that physically has not taken us very far, but that emotionally, in my opinion, has, we return to the starting point: to stasis and anticipation, marked, as in the track that opens the album, by a sense of serene acceptance and awareness that we can't always be the ones imposing changes in our lives, and that sometimes we can do nothing but wait for them to come to us, avoiding, for our own good, being too impatient."