space sound: First Light, by Dustin Tebbutt (LP)
a delicate sound comes from Australia, blending moods from Wisconsin and Michigan
I'm in as far as one can fall
Dustin Tebbutt is a musician from Armidale, New South Wales (Australia).
First Light came out in 2016 as his second album, produced alongside Karl Cash, also producer of Gangs of Youths.
The sound generally comprises of an alternative folky music, with sprouts of electronic music that will flourish in Tebbutt’s subsequent works - more on that later.
Above this record lie the shadows of Bon Iver and Sufjan Stevens: this is not necessarily a bad thing, it just speaks volumes about the influence these artists have had on the independent music movement.
First Light is also the name of the first song on the record, and Tebbutt here talks about being in love “as far as one can fall”, evidently hoping not to fall. It’s also a song about waking up and witnessing two sunrises: one outside the window, the other in someone’s eyes.
Wooden Heart is a solid song from the beginning, with the direct line of drums. And it’s direct in addressing that there must be physical signs of your love: a name carved on a tree, for example.
Give Me Tonight is what made me draw a comparison with some works from James Blake. It definitely is the most electronic influenced song in the record, and speaks of the “sacred” moments in which you tell each other your names on a bed: it’s a sensual song about not making love, but in celebrating it. Works as well.
Wild Blood is an invitation to be together, a song to plead “that you should stay this time”. Tebbutt evidently speaks about love in his songs, and this is the main thread: here he speaks about wild blood that maybe is the reason his loved one is running away, and it’s the same thing that draws him to them.
Because they’re “Still in My Heart”, as he says in the next song. His love is now an “open road”, where the “colours start to run”.
“See Your Gold” opens the second half of the record with a delicate track of piano, and then a plain guitar-picking. It seems an encore of Wild Blood in the lyrics, because here Tebbutt assures his lover that “I told you, you are enough”, because he sees “gold through the shadows”. It’s a good song to drift away to sleep, as I sometimes recall saying in this newsletter.
“Hawlett’s Comet” is not Halley’s, but indeed it comes back once in a while to remember you that “This is our love”, assuring Tebbutt that “the charts and stars were right”.
“In Too Deep” is the next song, and also the feeling we all have when listening to another love song. But love is not a finite thing for Tebbutt, as it seems, and he’s “drift[ing] away from the surface” of this love, only to come back and state, in the next song, that his love is “Brighter Than The Sun”, which is also the title of the next song. Here Tebbutt speaks about his lover as a lake, as a coast, as the entire nature Australia has, that draws him into his love, enduring and accreting it as a forming star.
I Only Have Good Memories (Of You) closes the record, and from the title it could appear as a sad song (would be the first on the record). And indeed it is an instrumental track, but it’s not necessarily a sad song: it has something that seems unresting, in seamless motion, though. It his a good ethereal song to end a record, and it shows that Tebbutt is also a good composer, other that a delicate singer.
But I can't change the way we love
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See you next time!