Ro Yourell: Commencer revivew – A coming-of-age album but not as you might imagine

Commencer is, as Ro Yourell explains, a “coming-of-age” album, but not quite as one might imagine. It is a record that seems to be more about exploring acceptance than any easy epiphanies, an acceptance informed by a sense of loss in varying forms.

As Yourell sings, on Dream Aloud, that he is “more sinner than sinned against”, it is clear that we are in ponderous terrain. Freedom continues that pondering, taking aim at structures that compound inequalities, building to a celestial crescendo where Simon & Garfunkel meet Fleet Foxes, with a hazy, hypnotic wash working its way through.

That hazy wash wrings itself out over much of this record, which has some really considered moments: Don’t Let Me’s dance of delicate discordance prefaces the glassy, bright piano of Mary, and the tinkling keys on How My Heart Beats foreground the dreamy guitars of the charming Forest Gate.

Some interesting references are at work. Elements of Mike Scott or perhaps John Bramwell seem to weave their way into Dance With You or the lovely When You Look At Me, ripe as they are with directness and wit.

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Citadel places us in firmly in a certain kind of 1960s/1970s American cultural milieu, with rich melodic reference points. Cinematic in scope, with a sense of the journey, it is searching in conceit, and an album highlight, as is Incinerate, with its strange moody guitar underpinning Yourell’s falsetto vocals. It is a composition that rails against a bitterly divided world, where so many of us are “enthralled with consumption and convenience … steadily losing our agency and our empathy to apathy”; it brings a different texture to the record, inviting us to be active in our lives and not passive.

Weightless, with its beautiful strings (arranged by Colm Mac Con Iomaire) pares everything back to a delicate and reflective emotional place, which is the DNA of this interesting, cohesive set of songs.

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