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Wednesday 2 October 2013

Black and White Boy - Fragile

As the last track slips into silence it begs the question why 'Black and White Boy' doesn't have his name liberally dropped into conversations about what is hot in the current music scene.
Of course the music business is all very hit and miss.
Labels literally gamble on acts.
Will they sell? (Always the bottom line).
Will we get a return on our investment?
Yet is seems obvious – well to me anyway – that with 'Fragile' we have an album that with the promotional budgets that the big boys have could sell massively.
It's a body of work that quite simply never once drops the ball.
I sat in the dark with headphones on and it felt like the music and lyrics snipped the thread that anchored me to the earth.
Gravity cancelled, and the weight of the detritus of life sluiced away leaving me weightless.
From about three songs in I was adrift and it felt good.
Sort of dreamlike in how all earthly constraints had let go.
How often can anyone say that about an album?
That instead of the music becoming a soundtrack to the background of what is going on, that instead life becomes the backdrop to the actual album.
Fragile is the perfect title when considered in the context of the lyrics, but when the release is taken as a whole I just get the strength of it all washing over me.
It has an enveloping warm embrace that holds you safely still and silent as it carries you towards the final track.
It's simply beautiful, a real, very real, emotional tour de force that eases rather effortlessly to that point where you listen to it all and it means something to you.
I suspect that very often that is exactly what artists want to do, to talk to us, to communicate personally on a one to one level and make every utterance something that we can feel a kinship to, and with Fragile that has been achieved.

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