- Pascal Babare’s meditations on life are a tonic. So often I hear him take a little slice of lived experience and transmute all that could be poisonous about it into harmless absurdities and gentle song. Without being trite or trivial, he has a gift for taking difficult things and transforming them into charming vignettes. The perspective he’s gained for himself he offers to his listeners, a little space. Life’s indignities don’t seem so bad when you can get a little bit of distance between them and yourself. That’s what Pascal has been looking for and what he offers, in a very magnanimous gesture: Endless Room.
Well, not endless, that’s less a promise and more a dream. It never feels less than an appropriate moniker for the reverberant echoes that gather around the folk-pop of this, his third full-length. There’s such easy-going optimism, even at its heaviest moments. Take for instance Big Money, dicing with the topic of death: “When I die, I don’t want no speeches / Perhaps just frenzied chanting / Rumbling from the bleachers / And they might scream ‘higher, higher / Throw him higher!” It’s a smilingly silly meditation on mortality that suddenly leaps back into wakefulness and life where everything is much less certain and secure: “But I’m still alive / And I see your eyes / Touching my things / I’ll call the police!” The music roars and wails before it crashes to its conclusion. Everything’s going so crazy at this point it’s a little difficult to be certain, but I think Babare is stage-whispering: “Lived one whole life / Just to sink their ships / I can’t swim! / Dreamt of a love / That could drown me whole / But I’m still cold.” Even with the weightiest drama, Pascal is a gently absurd humorist to the end.
It may be the biggest difference between Pascal Babare and Sufjan Stevens, an artist with whom he otherwise seems to have a great deal in common. Where Stevens takes on the big issues with a fearlessness that is daunting and often heartbreaking, Babare approaches them with an easygoing grin and still manages to reap significant rewards. While we’re on the topic, musically, there are really a lot of parallels between the pair. Across his three albums Babare has steadily been becoming more and more hi-fi really making the similarities obvious indeed. Although again, he's nothing like as po-faced as Phil Elverum, Barbare often namechecks The Microphones, an influence you can hear in the production of his earliest material. By contrast, on Endless Room with its rich harmonies and deftly orchestrated pop, you could easily imagine Illinois-era Sufjan as a ghostwriter.
In line with his quiet voice and meditative manner, I get the feeling Pascal Babare doesn’t like to big-note himself. For that reason I’m not sure how many people have cottoned on to him. More should, this collection of folk-pop vignettes is undoubtedly going to be one of the year's finer releases. Life isn’t ever easy and pop generally glosses over the more difficult stuff. Pascal Babare takes it on in all of its complexity, comes out the other side and everyone is the better for it.
- Chris Cobcroft.