So let's just get this out of the way up front: Gareth Dickson oftentimes sounds like/is inspired by Nick Drake. The comparison is unavoidable, and if I left out the mention in an effort not to pigeonhole him, you'd then listen to the music and say, 'Whoa - how did he miss that one?'
The next obvious thing to say is that he's not exactly like Nick Drake, because a number of the songs on his latest full-length, Collected Recordings, feature a distinctive finger picked acoustic style that is oh-so delicately blended with delay and reverb, in contrast to Joe Boyd's clean production.
Good. I, for one, am glad we've dispensed with the obvious and can now deal with the real art of the record.
After stints touring and collaborating with some of the most out-there and brilliant folk acts - most notably Vashti Bunyan, Juana Molina and Devendra Banhart - Dickson's focus turns inward, and it doesn't take long to realize that the fixed lens is on mortality. The album opens with his sparsest composition, "Fifth (The Impossibility of Death)". Populated by swirls of air and light brush strokes of plucked notes, the song gives us a heavy dose of what we will need to really take hold of the record: space. And while it may sound a bit like the music playing in a Brookstone store, the spell created by the mood makes one start to take the parenthetical title semi-seriously. But as we meet the second track, "If I", we get our first whispered, wet-tongued introduction to Dickson's voice, and he takes the opportunity to ambush the first track with a wistful 'If I die tomorrow'. The delivery is almost hopeful, saying that even if death is a possibility, it is not something to fear.
It is in these first two tracks that we get a sense of the pacing for the entire record: a dialogue between a calm, inquisitive voice and echoes of arpeggiated silence - a landscape that disappears into itself as soon as we think we recognize one of its clear details.
An example of this interchange lies between the mundane investigation of "Two Trains", and the clear night sky exploration of the following "Harmonics" (although I honestly believe he has a better title in him beyond just stating the guitar technique utilized in the song). While the cold, unfeeling American nihilist in me winces at his Scottish, still-bell-bottomed whimsy in the lines, 'Two trains running / Click clack; click-clack', his final statement 'It's all nothing' offers the perfect set-up to the note-dotted air of "Harmonics".
The end of the record changes its mode a bit, weaving vocals into the final four tracks, allowing the self-to-space dialogue a chance to wrap things up, or at least fade out. It is the penultimate track, "Technology" that finds Dickson at his most earnest, trading in his cloud-like major seventh chords for the pointilistic dissonance of minor dips. It is no surprise that among the only phrases that he sings beyond a whisper is 'Death is a breeze'.
Up to this point, even the recording quality has matched the rise to this track; chair-squeaks, clicks, and other ambient noise picked up by his omnidirectional microphone clear up and dissipate to let the song smith offer his confident lament. But just as clarity is cresting, the album ends with "Like a Clock" - a return to the major key, but accompanied and overshadowed by room static and delayed feedback. And while I am notorious for not being able to understand lyrics (explaining why I make my home here at TSB), "Like A Clock" seems to want to let the music and words spin into that disappearing landscape in ways not yet heard on the record. Snippets that arise along the horizon are haunting: '[Silence] doesn't set you free', 'Never loved anyone / who loved me', and a garbled reference to somehow always being a part of 'the Man from Galilee'. Christological interpretations aside, we end as we began: considering that collected sounds rise and decay, but perhaps there will always remain a still, small voice that defiantly calls the end an impossibility.
-Bryan Parys