- Find A Home is a subtle meeting of sounds and moods, gently being sown together into a surprisingly compelling, cohesive headspace. Its creators, Downend, have really made me think about that space. In a way that’s distinctly not traditional its almost a psychedelic journey and the weirdness is amplified by the fact that Downend don’t look much like a psych band. At first glance the Brisbane jazz duo perform like one of those Sunday afternoon cafe acts, letting the easy-listening roll forth via improvised vocalise and neat little guitar licks. Yet it’s like discovering your chai-latte has been spiked with just a dash of ketamine: there’s something going on here that I didn’t expect.
Both of the opening tracks give you an idea. The instrumental intro grows through rolling guitar and formless whispers from something quietly sweet into a pulsing burst of harmonic heat. The sensation of spiking temperature is one that returns across the record. Layers of harmonic colour and volume surge until it's all a bit unsettling, though not unwelcome. The sensation is teased out on single Can’t Sleep, where vocalist Kayleigh Pincott plays with the languorous feeling of being half-asleep, half-awake, gently pushed and pulled by strange emotions, romantic and mind-expanding.
After our introduction to that kind of bedroom atmosphere, the leaping and rolling, wordless vocalise that is simply, leadingly titled Sven makes me grin a little. Find A Home is dotted with these little ‘instrumentals’, like nodes of energy making everything shake and shudder just that little bit more.
The album’s title-track is its philosophical heart, if something so simple can really be called that. “Find a home where you can live / Side by side, we can begin / Put it off ‘til you cave in.” A tiny little, spiritual mantra in folk music, searching, not too diligently, for the sweet spot between two people and inside oneself; a little nirvana. Swimming deepens the romantic themes, adding the inevitable undercurrents of uncertainty and conflict. Musically it’s a chimera of ambient and adult-contemporary jazz, like if you were to split the difference between Sarah McLachlan and Grouper. This fits with Downend’s MO: those cafe stylings cut with something a little bit more adventurous. As if to double down on that idea, we’re soon treated to a cover of Björk’s Unravel, a late-’90’s Homogenic-era song. It’s almost too perfect a fit: that time between the simple tunefulness of her first records and the growing strangeness, darkness of everything that came after. The wistful illustration of longing, poised between the warmth of love and the slowly growing cold and disillusionment that Björk has gone on to depict with unflinching, tragic honesty. Downend do their own, much gentler elegy to love lost: Softly, Slowly rounds out the record with a surprising balance of sentimentality and dignity: “Please let me go slowly so I don’t even know.”
Love is the hackneyed bedrock of popular music, there’s no reason at all for it to be special, at this point. Downend -even this late in the history of pop- do find something unexpected there. Gently sowing together genres and moods into an emotional whole, that by turns surges and then gently pulses. Find A Home with all of its hormonally generated tribulations and rewards is the unexpected, hard to explain headspace of new love.
- Chris Cobcroft.