“There’s a mighty judgment coming / But I may be wrong”, Leonard Cohen croons on “Tower of Song”, a career highlight from 1988’s dark, moody I’m Your Man. Whichever it is, he doesn’t sound overly concerned. No, he sounds like a fatalist with a dry sense of humour.
On their fourth album, No Time for Poetry, the Californian husband-and-wife duo The Saxophones – Alexi Erenkov and Alison Elderdice – also question the current state of the world and they take a similar stance, striking a balance between anxiety and resignation. “The shanty towns are burning / Still I’m, still I’m, still I’m doing fine”, Erenkov’s rich baritone lilts on opener “Too Big for California”, but can one be unfazed by an unfolding catastrophe caused by wildfires? Well, amidst the natural destruction and the social issues California is grappling with – homeless epidemic and gun violence to name but two – it’s still possible to live a normal life. Normal, that is, for a society where priorities are skewed: you may feel slightly worried about the burning vineyards, but the joy of savouring wine helps you alleviate your concern.
This wry resignation is ever present on No Time for Poetry, and it’s not the only similarity the album shares with Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man. The band have acknowledged mid-period Cohen as a key inspiration, with Erenkov crediting “the kind of dystopian songs he was writing with a satirical attitude” as helping to set the album’s darker political tone. Unlike 2023’s breezy and peaceful To Be A Cloud, influenced by jazz and bossa nova, The Saxophones’ latest offering largely relies on brooding synth pads, a lot like the ones you hear on I’m Your Man – and in 80s L.A. cop dramas. Indeed, the spectre of the entire decade hangs over the record; you’re being transported to the Reagan era.
Twenty seconds in, the synthesizer sounds eerie and ominous, and you feel as if you’re watching the opening credits of a slasher flick. A few more seconds pass and the synth strings take you to a scene in a legal courtroom drama like, say, The Accused. Then Erenkov starts singing, “I floated down that lazy river / It’s not boring when you’re drinking wine”, his voice mirroring the scene he describes before his saxophone and regular collaborator Richard Laws’ bass join in to lend the song the assured melancholy that is so characteristic of The Saxophones’ sound.
What makes No Time for Poetry different from the duo’s previous albums, however, is that none of the songs was written on guitar, with everything starting on keyboards. Obsessed with Enter the Zenmenn, the debut LP of Berlin-based genre-blurring band The Zenmenn, Erenkov felt inspired to “dust off what might be thought of as some of my dorkier 80s and 90s keyboards and go a bit more digital”. There’s nothing dorky about the outcome of this experiment. The duo’s understated glamour and inherent romanticism is still intact, but it’s now coupled with a sense of tension, which gives an edginess to their natural, old-fashioned charm. And it’s only on the penultimate track, Wayward Men, that you realise six-string guitars have been absent all along: snarls leap from guest musician Indigo Street’s instrument, snapping at you like a scared dog. That’s not the first time the music startles you either.
Eight or so minutes earlier, during “I Fought the War”, you take fright as the synth summons the sound of imminent danger – think a masked murderer stalking teenagers through the woods. That is scary enough, but then Alderdice lends her haunting vocals to the 1:49-minute track, and you know those kids won’t make it out alive. Once more, though, Erenkov offsets the suspense with the lines “Now I’m so much older / I can look upon disorder / And still feel absolutely fine” delivered in sprechgesang. There’s that resignation again, or perhaps you want to call it gauzy optimism, but regardless of its name, it helps you conclude that you have no cause for concern either. Your troubles might just drift away.
There’s always a glimmer of hope, even in songs that deal with subject matters like death and the sorrow of losing someone. Named after a cemetery in Petaluma, California, where Erenkov grew up, “Cypress Hill” finds him wondering despairingly if he will love again, but he also seems certain that “there’s nothing between us”, suggesting that reconnecting with the physical being that has been lost is well within the bounds of possibility. We tend to think the gulf between the living and the dead is unbridgeable; it turns out to be non-existent.
Divisions are very much present elsewhere, though, most notably in society and politics. The band address them in tracks like “At Peace with Power” – a marriage between the synth of Some Great Reward-era Depeche Mode and the vocals of Tindersticks’ Stuart A. Staples – and the satirical, Rhodes-driven “America’s the Victim” where Erenkov voices his frustration with historically dominant groups that act as if they’re the ones being persecuted. “White man’s the victim / America’s the victim / Somehow, you never knew”, he quips, and somehow, defying the sarcasm, the strings and the wind instruments manage to add a quiet grace to the song. “Ave Maria, my favourite song”, he murmurs and, indeed, the track’s fragile beauty rivals that of Schubert’s lieder.
No Time for Poetry is a million miles away from contemporary pop, and not only because it’s permeated with the spirit of the 80s. You won’t find the traditional verse-chorus-verse structure anywhere, in fact, you barely find anything you can identify as a chorus. Also, the band have avoided “adding extra bells and whistles to make the songs interesting, relying instead on a few core elements for each. And yet the result is captivating, both musically and lyrically. Erenkov has said he “wanted to write a sexy album that said ‘Fuck you’ to Trump.” Personally, I would go with “full of heart, yet knowingly playful” but that is, of course, a less pithy description. As for Trump, he’ll never know this record exists, and even if he did find out, it would be lost on him. But we’re smarter than Trump and know exactly what the Saxophones mean: there is time for poetry – always. This album has it in spades.
The Saxophones: No Time For Poetry – Out 7 November 2025 (Full Time Hobby Records)
Saxophones – Too Big for California [Official Video]
