Adam Donen – Immortality

Adam Donen doesn't do things by halves. Having praised his first band Alexandria Quartet a year earlier, in 2008 TLOBF put the then Adam Donen and the Drought on at Ill Fit supporting Loney Dear off the back of their fire and brimstone part-orchestral dynamism As Our Parents Slowly Turn To Clay. As things tend to do in Donen's world, they soon fell apart, at which he took up with the classical poets and away from lit-art-rock cliche.On that last album, Donen took on the road broadly travelled by fellow poet turned songwriter Leonard Cohen. Making the political personal and vice versa with a cracked vocal and a similarly distorted worldview. Here vocal and acoustic guitar are very much central even as strings swell around it, lyrically an insistent unfolding, occasionally semi-cryptic spiel that passes the six minute threshold a couple of times. The title track is one such swirling epic. Elegant strings and woodwind curl around a break-up entanglement, Donen darkly speaking of "a thorn for your side" and "our hopes though all realised were never enough to escape from the cusp of the heaven we thought that we sought". The other, 'A Century Of Stone', is the album's lyrical epic, a contemplative view of the attempt to find a course in life and love and its plausible consequences.If this, as some sources suggest, is a break-up album it's one that attempts to find the middle ground between regret and remorse. Occasionally it's confessional and the close miked recording indulging the listener in the guiltiest secrets, as on the memory and loss of 'Fragment (I Had A Dream...)'. At other times, the reflecting quiet anger of 'It's Over Now' seems directed at modern mores and manners with its suggestion of how "you can preside over the decline of a civilisation". The music often follows suit, 'Tomorrow's Gone' is shrouded in sumptuous arrangements around a strong melody underneath, Â the album's most Dylanesque moment.If it doesn't sound like an easy, throwaway listen... well, it isn't. True, it cloaks most of its big message for and about humanity in layers of metaphor and allusion, elliptical references and fragmentary phrasing, making more sense of earlier Coleridge comparisons. Yet it often comes with a spiritually informed belief that suggests a British, more literary and less post-rock howling contemporary to Josh T Pearson. Despite being all of a musical piece it's never allowed to settle into an elegaic torpor. It may require the listener's careful attention but only insomuch as it's steeped in ideas. Swapping Donen's previous hell for leather preacher's instinct for something more classically attuned, as something that doesn't take the listener for granted, it delivers in spades.