Hour - Ease The Work

A strong contender for Album Of The Year, Hour’s first LP release is a bucolic stroll on Peaks Island, Maine, where it was recorded over the course of a week before the start of the touristic season, by a collective of 10 musicians from very diverse backgrounds (punk, experimental, classical). Instrumental bliss obviously recalling Eiko Ishibashi, Deux Filles's Space and Time, but also the profoundly American melancholy of Ernest Hood and Edward Hopper. A simpler and better life is possible.

I feel like I already said a lot in the opening paragraph, and anything I’d add would be superfluous. Writing a lot about music, I hate to say that the music speaks for itself, but sometimes, it does; Hour's music is so fully emotionally charged and cinematic that apart from listing the other brilliant composers it reminds me of I can't escape a trip down memory lane. Flashes of me stopping at a 7/11 in the Japanese countryside to buy myself a treat, taking the ferry boat to some isle in Brittany, sharing beers and cigarettes on a rooftop...

It is brilliantly evocative and communicative as well as the collective energy of the band (who was sharing communal life on that Island, from dusk to dawn) shines through the record. Among other things, Ease The Work is an ode to the utter magic of creating music together, as a band. The same magic that amazed Miles Davis when he recorded with his quintet the ESP LP (hence the name of the album - ESP stands for extrasensory perception) and possibly the most esoteric and magical thing I ever experienced in my life. But, as I was saying, it's about much more than that: songs about the mundane, the suburban, and the beauty of what doesn't shine. Just like Izumi Hirakawa's 3 last year, Ease the Work is an antidote against everything tacky in the music world we're living in.

 Released without a bang, a criminally limited US only release (I got some copies when I travelled there earlier this week), it's likely to end at the top of my Album of the Year list... Highest recommandation (M/M - with inserts and download code)