Slow Dancing Society – The Cogent Sea

[Reviewed by Peter Marks]

Take equal parts Michael Brook, Pieter Nooten and Heavenly Bodies. Throw in even more reverb and then heap on the delays. Now that that’s all simmering, up the intensity. This is the world of Slow Dancing Society, a one man project who like the artists listed above prefers to linger in the moment. No detail is too small nor are any set of notes too remote for this one not to reach, he’ll bring out the atmosphere in even the most mundane setting. With the gradual progressions of a wave forming out at sea and then gracefully dying before it hits the shore this is an album made for two. Be they waves and sand, acrimony and regret or as The Church put on the inside of an album: the joy of expectation.

I know this is going to sound somewhat sugary to most listeners and that’s ok. Slow Dancing Society operate in the realms of sensuality and saudade, a delightfully undefined locale crammed with the possibilities of what could or should be hanging precariously close. Dangling almost. Just out of reach and with an agonizing beauty illuminating your eyes from within each wickedly spiced track. The strange intimacy of her skin next to your own; that brief moment when you don’t know who it is but you want them and you don’t even know why. The predawn demands of the flesh combined with the uncertainty of unfolding, completely enveloping darkness. Heaven in the backseat, yes that’s it alright; don’t act as though you don’t know what’s there. Waiting patiently.

Burn a candle late at night when you play ‘The Cogent Sea’, bask in the glistening arrangements and be subsumed by the vagaries of memories that just won’t quite gel. The cover of this record exudes a lonely existence but don’t be deceived, there is remarkable warmth contained here. Just underneath the icy exteriors and rigid framework: the blood still courses through the veins. Like a deep, penetrating wound… slow to rise at first but then steadily it comes. The shift in perception, a salon full of mirrors with each one reflected off the other. Have we lost our minds or has this music taken us somewhere else.

To a secret and hidden place where the past and present merge in a luminous cascade of sights and sounds which few can discern. How far can one artist and their craft pull you out of your own life? Listen to this album and decide that for yourself, only don’t do it hastily and don’t expect it all to hit you at once. This individual clearly revels in the sublime, no note is out of place, no hint of beauty given up rashly. Everything is conceived and composed to hit all those sweet spots in your head which you thought no one else could. It’s divine here, think I’ll stay a while.

Slow Dancing Society – The Cogent Sea
Hidden Shoal Recordings
CD/Digital 2014