Ben Howard
The Burgh Island EP

“Every Kingdom” is a lively and full of life album. I would compare it to adolescence or a love relationship in full swing. In the album, there are also melancholic moments (“Everything” and “Black Flies” most notably), just as there are such moments in adolescence and in a relationship, but these are moments where the pain is always filtered through a kind of film that I would call unawareness. The subsequent album, “I Forget Where We Were," which I recently reviewed, shows us a Ben Howard almost entirely different, transformed. No longer a boy who feels and observes pleasure and pain, his or others', filtered through that film I spoke of, but a young man who, willingly or unwillingly, cannot help but see the world for what it is: in its positive aspects, and especially in those negative ones that inevitably cause suffering. There is no longer any filter, no film to protect him from reality, softening its contours. In the Ep “The Burgh Island,” which stands between the two publications, I see a sort of ajar threshold. A threshold that until then had been well sealed. Or perhaps, even better, a first tear in that film that filtered every experience, saving our Ben from the awareness of the real. “The Burgh Island” is like the last drunken evenings spent by an adolescent who, dazed, observes the mysterious horizon ahead of him, feeling for the first time afraid of the unknown, aware that this phase of his life is coming to an end. Or it could represent the last evenings of a couple who knows they have reached the conclusion of their love and, not yet having the courage to admit it, nostalgically remember the beautiful moments of their story. This is what I perceive in the four tracks that make up the Ep. “Esmerelda,” whose verse is a dark guitar arpeggio accompanying a melancholic song that then explodes into an energetic chorus, yet exudes nostalgia for something we are losing, that is sinking, drowning among the waves of a black sea. The wonderful “Oats In the Water,” hypnotic in the verse thanks to a magnificent guitar arpeggio and a melancholic, nostalgic, and conciliatory song at the same time, then engages and drags into an extremely emotional chorus, not to mention the goosebumps-inducing guitar solo that closes the song... “To Be Alone” is an almost ambient crescendo in which Ben obsessively repeats that he doesn’t need anyone, but at the same time that he is alone, then vents in a sweet and melodic chorus that I would never tire of listening to. The Ep ends with another stunning piece: the relaxed and relaxing “Burgh Island (feat. Monica Heldal).” With this last song less tense than the others, perhaps there is the detachment from such thoughts that torment the young man at the end of his adolescence, or the couple grappling with the harsh reality of things, or maybe simply the acceptance of change. The acceptance that existence is a cycle, indeed, a succession of cycles. And every cycle has a beginning and an end. "The Burgh Island" is like a slightly wobbly bridge over the abyss that connects the known with the unknown, that connects the past with the future, adolescence with adulthood.