Titanic, musical clarity runs through the Los Angeles air of ‘A Deeper Understanding’. ‘Nothing To Find’ is thick with pure, propellant euphoria – rising from the changing tides of the past to destroy feeling, where ‘Holding On’ calls loveless consequences from across the room – an ascending hive of warning that hides a future within reeds of retrospective ache. Granduciel sinks with reflections of letting go too fast, or of holding on for too long, before bowing out to a question pulled from the core of the record: “Hope or heart?” Nothing is hidden, and everything is felt.
Lush, 82-mile expanse – driven by need and almost-understanding, buries itself deep in the album’s changing mind. “Is this love?” Ganduciel asks on the fantasy-Americana of ‘In Chains’, where the dancing of ‘Clean Living’ wants to be shown how to leave loneliness behind. Granduciel’s voice swims skyward on ‘Knocked Down’, only to fall from a great height. “Far away there is a star,” begins the slow-burner – thinking of a place where one might dare to be free, before the fantasist steps through dream-gate into a world of raining shame. “I want to love you but I get knocked down,” extinguishes the diamonds of Granduciel’s night sky and offers a heavy blow to those who wish to give in, but can’t.
Layers of grasping, falling, foaling – limbs of “I want to make you stay,” fight from beneath the surface of Granduciel’s walls of weather on ‘You Don’t Have To Go’ – closing the album non-conclusively and speaking to the lack of finality that’s held within the frontman’s perfectionist, labyrinthine-dream. There is no ‘over’, only ‘forward’, and Granduciel has never sounded closer to finding what can’t be found. “All alone. Beaten up. Free.”
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