Majical Cloudz: Are You Alone? - Album Review

Are you ready to be heartbroken all over again?

2013's Impersonator album from Montreal's Devon Welsh and his collaborator Matthew Otto caught many with its plaintive, sparse, austere, streamlined and coldly unadorned songs about life, love and loss.

Similar tones, timbres and fixations abound here as Welsh sets out once again to show that sad songs can say so much, with meditations on a relationship break-up and other blue, noir themes.

Again and again, he leans on bare-bones, minimal, skeletal frameworks to propel lonesome, troubled, sad-eyed odes like If You're Lonely and Call On Me to lodge squarely between your ears.

These musings are hushed and muted, yet there’s something in Welsh and Otto’s beautifully arranged sound design which fills the spaces in between.

[ majicalcloudz.com ]