The Dutch creation of musician, Annelotte de Graaf was a mere nothing last year, a musician with a wistful dream and ambition. One that took a lot of guts and gumption to complete after she aborted the Netherlands in search of finer things in the USA. Taking on board every element of the American dream notion that we are consistently reminded of within every single piece of fiction that is produced by the States, de Graaf packed in her job and went to record. It was a bold move, it was the essential beauty of musical creation that morphed around the 1960s notion of packing it in and moving away – thanks Neil Young – and now, ‘de Graaf’ is the latest addition to the collective.
Fading Lines is the brain child of this project, it is the outpouring of wistful dreaming, youthful ambition and ultimately, a documentary of what it is like to be a young musician in the modern day. Recorded at Strange Weather Studio in New York with Ben Greenberg (The Men, Destruction Unit, Beach Fossils), it was a slightly adverse move from de Graaf to pick a producer so bestowed within the latest punk music. From here Annelotte constructed what was to be Amber Arcades in this format, made up of members from Quilt on guitar and bass and Jackson Pollis of Real Estate on drums, the format of ethereal, psychedelia-tinged folk began to alight.
What really makes the Fading Lines a beautiful album is how the ethics and ideology tie so closely with the music presented. Everything about the album glimmers, it has a sheen to it, much like the sunny fields of the British countryside, after spending all day within fogs of smoke and cans of home-brewed cider. There’s something beautifully juvenile about the album, take the opener: ’Come With Me’ – a song that propels images of escape, not just within the song title itself but within the scampering drums and guitar that desperately tries to keep up, as if the younger brother who is keen to play with his brother’s older, cooler buddies. It plays around with Suicide sounds sounds and ties them into that War On Drugs, hazy ethic.
It’s the youthful bliss that propels Fading Lines, it’s an album that hides it’s maturity behind skipping town, behind running away in search of adventure. The architectural design for a utopian city is masked within ‘Constant’s Dream’, it presents nostalgia and loss through the magnifying glass of optimism. It’s a hard concept which Annelotte plays around with but it is within her childish hands that real beauty is created, coming of age albums are hard and projecting your interpretation of the world when lost within the centre of a Kerouac novel can often fall upon a double-edged sword. Essentially, it is either sincere or clichéd. As de Graaf hums: “Live your lives to never belong /
Where to roam around” you can’t help but feel she is touching upon questioning the pressures of the modern day, the necessity to belong.
What is it all for? Why is there a need to belong? To be caught within a certain frame and a certain motion, void of adventure. It seems de Graaf has the same issues and where the album really, really shines is when Greenberg’s magic comes to light. It appears his previous experience of working with high velocity punk bands threads a hidden angst within Amber Arcades’ charming psychedelia-folk. Glimmers of Stereolab and Wolf Alice come to light throughout the title track, ‘Fading Lines’. The more bottle-nosed sensibility to psychedelia emerges throughout ‘Perpetuum Mobile’, a track that forges an allegiance between evocative organ sounds and a more abstract distorted vocal coverage.
The strength of Amber Arcades’ début album is it’s surrounding versatility. It can tie in the bigger songs quite closely alongside the delicate ones. ‘Right Now’ has done the circuits quite frequently on the 6music playlists and for good reason it would appear it once again finds the more abrasive side to Greenberg’s production whilst projecting this punk sound through a distanced kaleidoscopic eye. It’s not far from Melody’s Echo Chamber with a slight Gun Club twist to it.
What Fading Lines promises musically is not necessarily new or innovative. It is quite easily bracketed within the Kurt Vile, Melody’s Echo Chamber, Real Estate sound. It finds it’s home around delicate melodies, frequent shifts of phased guitar sounds and methodic, ritualistic drum patterns. Where it shows promise though is within the content of the music, it is consistent as an album and does not really falter too much. De Graaf can demonstrate twists and turns within the tempo and actual deliverance of her music, it bends around the delicate, see ‘Apophenia’ whilst also showing promise of a harder hitting punk attitude at times.
The dreamlike qualities of Fading Lines are not the whimsical kind as such, regardless of the ethereal qualities of the album. De Graaf’s experience prior to the release of Fading Lines surrounds dreams of working as a legal aide on UN war crime tribunals and working in human rights law regarding the Syrian refugee crisis; ultimately these dreams were transposed into a reality. Therefore, it is fair to say that when dreams and reality tie together, de Graaf can pinpoint quite a solid relationship between the two, not only projecting her dreams within music but also within real life situations as well. It is no surprise that the likes of ‘Turning Light’ play around within the intensity of these dreamlike situations projecting the true, as well as the synthetics. As a song at the end, it takes a turn from the escapism and flips the mirror back upon yourself, just as you thought you had got off easy:
The clock is ticking before we can begin
A different puzzle, reality subsides
Meaning these motions, there isn't brighter light
It’s quite marvellous how Annelotte de Graaf can seemingly take the uncanny and darker motion of reality and splice it alongside escapist, youthful dreams. It forges around a slightly more transient, immersive electronic style, touching upon Motorik drums in a similar fashion to works by the likes of Death In Vegas and Neu! As the longer song on the album, you can’t help but feel this is intentional to exaggerate the meaning behind the song.
The lethargic, sleepy ’White Fuzz’ closes what is actually, a seemingly very interesting album. It is a story, a dream, a poem and a social commentary all simultaneously. It poses as many questions as it does answers regarding the current social malaise, whether this is surrounding political gestures or the mechanical constraints of society nowadays. What emphasises the album is the youthful optimism that de Graaf has the gusto to play around with in the do or die world we now embody, packing in life in Utrecht to spend a lifetime’s worth of savings upon recording a debut is a brave move and for this reason, combined with the rest, we should be grateful for forward thinking musicians such as Annelotte de Graaf.
Tom Churchill
Website: amberarcades.net
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