Worlds End 2023
In Time
Searching for the meaning of life, St. Ives collective measure its flow through the tuneful grandeur of their philosophical fantasies.
For some artists, letting creative pieces run for an epic length is a way of stating their progressive credentials; for this ensemble, though, it’s part of letting a concept shape a musical form. While the Cornish foursome’s "To Touch The Sky" dealt with space, the follow-up to their 2021 album plays around temporal matters – from a personal perspective to the consequences of perceiving one’s moments and lifespan in such a manner. Here’s why the choice of wrapping their ideas in three compositions with diminishing returns – in terms of both extent and excitement, as if per age’s dictum – and with “time” in the titles should seem only logical. And here’s why the pieces on offer feel so wondrous.
More so, this approach should free the musicians behind this album of art-rock shackles, allowing the quartet’s interplay to follow a melodic scheme rather than stick to genre clichés. Soon after delicately rippling ivories open the portal into “Out Of Time” to transport the listener beyond the mundane, soaring guitars bring on an emotional storm through the deceptively calm waves which Tree Stewart’s half-submerged vocals ride with a lot of grace before breaking the sonic surface. There, Ally Carter’s six strings and sax become in turns frantic and pacific and Dave Greenaway’s basses rumble and ramble alongside and on top of other instruments to shatter’s one’s wall of indifference and see electric piano dive in and jive in a jazzy way. That’s where the band’s faux-orchestral dynamics unfurl in full, and that’s where Tom Jackson’s drums can fully fathom the madness of a human’s grasp of an instant on the crossroads of Eastern weave and Western patterns.
Set against it, the cymbals’ rustle and bottom-end strum leading into “Timeless” may suggest the further drift will be less dramatic, with brass and woodwind lifting the weight but, despite the four-to-the-floor groove, the number’s folk undercurrent can’t avoid grabbing the audience’s hearts for a series of histrionic, yet gripping and tunefully rewarding, experiences staged by the performers’ fingers and the singer’s voice. And then there’s “The March Of Time” to pave the route towards the platter’s finale via the series of solemn, and slightly nebulous, passages which propel the record’s mesmeric message to the cathartic, worrisome triumphant fadeout into infinity. The infinity that’s encapsulated in this masterpiece of an album.
*****
