“On the last day, we were there / You said you wished we could stay / Boarded the plane and everything / Changed,” he sings on the track, in his sticky Canadian tenor so tight-lipped, it whistles.Īs essential to indie folk as George Saunders is to short-story collections for the better part of a decade, Shauf, ever the Saskatchewanian balladeer, always understands the assignment. (Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.With the release of “Spanish on the Beach” out of nowhere on a random Wednesday earlier this month-while, unbeknownst to most of us, a whole new record was waiting in the wings-listeners were reintroduced to Andy Shauf’s magnetic, rich mindset with a cut about hypothetical marriage and returning from a trip worse off than when you booked it. The thought is momentarily thrilling, and the music is equally smokey and romantic, until he cuts himself off: “Oh, I’m already bored.” He’s learning that there’s a whole world out there-new people to meet, other stories to tell, more nights to regret. The record ends with a similarly subdued revelation, as the narrator allows himself a brief fantasy about how things could have played out differently between them. In “Try Again,” a loaded misunderstanding provides one of the album’s best scenes: “I miss this,” she says, touching his coat “I miss you too,” he responds “I was talking about the coat,” she clarifies. Shauf is growing increasingly masterful at casting a spotlight on tiny moments that tend to get overlooked in stories about relationships. Still, the closer you listen, the more rewarding it becomes. The Neon Skyline doesn’t require deep investment in its narrative to enjoy. How sad can you be when the bartender knows what you want without asking and the jukebox has your favorite song? But he also sounds a good deal lighter than he did on The Party, as the story of The Neon Skyline calls for a voice that can drift from bar to bar, mood to mood. He’s actually from Regina, Saskatchewan and just so happens to pronounce the name “Charlie” in a way that sounds closer to “shoreline.” He cracks a good joke about this in the jaunty “Try Again,” where his narrator approximates a British accent to a response of bewilderment: “What was that supposed to be?” Like any good storyteller, he knows when to punch things up-you could play a drinking game with the number of times he mentions characters laughing at each other. Upon first listen, I was certain he was Scottish. When he sings about an intimate story transporting him into someone else’s home, you feel like you’re there with him.įor all Shauf’s expertise as a writer and arranger, the quality of his music that stands out is his gentle, fluttering vocal affectation. The ambling folk music-which Shauf plays entirely by himself on piano, guitar, woodwinds, and beyond-dims and intensifies to suggest a change in setting. The most affecting songs arrive during the album’s mid-section, when a polite question about a friend’s kid in “Living Room” turns into a hallucinogenic vision quest about death and reincarnation and living out our parents’ mistakes. The mood-wistfulness giving way to self-deprecation, deep insight cut with awful puns-is both familiar and endearing. He’s now in his early 30s, more than a decade removed from an early adulthood spent playing Christian pop-punk, and he has updated his songwriting to reflect precisely the kinds of social situations that keep polite, seemingly well-adjusted adults awake at night. There is no irony, little closure, and often no moral at the end. Deeply earnest but wary of dipping into melodrama, Shauf gravitates toward the quietly stirring realizations you’d find in a Raymond Carver story. These are subtle scenes to hinge a narrative on, especially one as simple as this. Instead, the key lyric is about a simple facial expression that suggested how things could never be the same again. In the climactic “Thirteen Hours,” Shauf drifts through a flashback that doesn’t focus on the fight that brought out their true nature, or the injury that landed one of them in the hospital. But by this point, late in the album, you’ve learned that reconciliation was never the point. He eventually runs into her and they go their separate ways. From there, he spirals through the course of their relationship from young love to jealous arguments to dreams of starting over. The story goes like this: Our narrator heads to a bar where he hears that his ex is back in town. Shauf’s new concept album The Neon Skyline takes place over the span of one night, as did his last solo record, 2016’s The Party.
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