'Can I prove we exist? / Where are the hours we missed? / This summer night is clear / I still want you near’. Ben Watt has brought a seasonally influenced nostalgic look at love and the chapters that it works through within our lives. He is back to bring us a charming look at mankind’s most sincere emotion and how it works within our existences.
It’s been two years since Watt’s last effort, refreshing news for any fan who feared they may have had to wait a monstrous 31 years like they did for the second effort. The former Everything But the Girl member has struck back with his third solo effort, the follow up to 2014’s Hendra, teaming up once more with the ex-Suede guitarist, Bernard Butler and this time Watt has been given free reign to self-produce. Fever Dream is as elegant and intricate as you would expect from a musician such as Ben Watt, a man who embraces his folk roots to the core and uses them to pose sincerity within his work. For an album that wears the theme of love wholeheartedly upon its sleeve, it documents snapshots of heartfelt emotion from start to finish. The autumnal feel of the album sleeve is something that edges closer to the music the more you listen to the album. It’s poised within the lyrics from start to finish, within the voice of Watt and also documented clearly on the LP artwork. Wraps of warm reds, oranges and decaying yellows litter the cover like discarded leaves from a tree at the back end of October. There’s something beautiful that Watt is going for on Fever Dream.
Watt appears to have turned towards America’s contemporary influences somewhat. Butler’s work on the album leads it towards an intriguing view of Kurt Vile’s stuttered electric guitar work, the slight haze of psychedelia bleeding through with over tones of distortion wrestling with the acoustic intimacy of Watt’s guitar work. Nowhere is this evidenced better than on the pre-released single, ‘Between Two Fires’; a song that documents the struggles of the impending end to a relationship. Watt said, "It’s an end-of-relationship song – someone driving away from the past, struggling to apportion no blame and resolve things in their own mind.” It seems that Watt balances personal lyrics within a moving sound. The rhythm of the song carries you in a transporting motion, it leans on relief and transgression in life and Watt shows complete ability in comprehending and demonstrating this movement to the audience.
‘Gradually’ furthers this notion acting as the sombre opening to an album that is so obsessed with the theme of intimate changes within people’s lives. Butler’s guitar work compliments the music so perfectly in the way it outlines emotion and adds curvature to the song, building up tension with his jagged, feedback-ridden sound as Watt does the same within his deliverance of emotional language:
Some days I lose touch with you
Strangers in all we do
No words are on your lips
We pass like silent ships
The simplistic formula that Watt has turned to within this album is testament to the nature of the genuine humane topic. It is purely centred around Watt’s delicate vocal deliverance, guitar work and Butler's silhouetting of the entire thing. The stripped back feel adds to the naturalistic presence of the album and allows songs like ‘Fever Dream’ to remain so uplifting with its endearing honesty.
The pastoral setting remains with the folklore tales that Watt tells within songs like ‘Women’s Company’, a song that points to the past as much as others do to the present situation. Watt’s hazy voice sits and smoulders, just as it would if it was being told over a campfire. The song is wrapped in nostalgia and telling tales from what now seems to be a wise owl on the top of his musical game.
Emotional tugs are pulled throughout the album, it is weighted heavily on the torments of relationships and the dwellings that loss of love can leave us within. Fever Dream in this respect acts as the perfect album to hear if you were to share his torment, it is impossible to ignore the heartbreak wrapped within Watt’s most recent effort. An album that musically warms itself within the halcyon days of summer whilst simultaneously juxtaposing this with the death of love in the lyrics and ultimately, the death of the year; see ‘Winter’s Eve’: 'Feel the northern latitudes, the dark begin / The month of blood, the end of light’.
The album does not entirely pour itself into the folk-jazz instrumentation from start to finish, there are different tangents that run throughout, different pockets explored where Watt digs his hand in and pulls sprinkles of MGMT-esque synthesised subtleties, as evidenced in ‘Running with the Front Runners’. A song that twists throughout the Venice Beach criteria, calming washes of electronics are provided by Jim Watson who features again on ‘Never Goes Away’, this time providing organ on perhaps the more blues orientated of the tracks. The blues being a real signature of Watt’s emotional outpour, every note from Butler’s buckling lead lines to Rex Horan’s off-beat double bass is used with such exquisite taste.
As the album closes, Watt introduces Marissa Nadler into the vocal mix, adding yet another angle to his music that leaves the album being little short of perfect. It’s an exceptional triumph for Watt. He documents the most sincere of human emotions from start to finish and produces it in a snapshot manner, each song being a story and journey that he at some point has taken, his personal tone within allows it to remain from being aloof and caught in pretence. It takes the folk genre and sticks rigidly to it asides from the occasional venture towards a slightly more abstract sound where Watt demonstrates further his songwriting prowess. The cathartic pain is something that allows each track to be relatable and tangible, it’s a blessing in disguise that it is such a heartfelt album but certainly one that we should not take for granted.
Tom Churchill
Website: benwatt.com
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