★★★★☆
Of all the remarkable things about Your Friend’sGumption, perhaps the most astonishing is its surreal rhythm.
Somehow, like a figure from a dream, the album manages to move both fast and slow. It’s languid and yet immediate, distinctly laid-back but forever propelled forward by a slow-motion suddenness entirely of its own.
This is an album that lives forever in your immediate past; you only really ‘get’ each note about ten seconds after you have actually heard it, and it takes time for the true pleasures of a track like ‘Who Will I Be In The Morning?’ to sink in. Everything is suggested rather than stated, and the soft joys stemming from a masterwork like ‘Heathering’ are as vague and powerful as the connotations a word like ‘home’ summons. In fact, ‘summon’ might be the word of the day. Taryn Miller, the musician behind the Your Friend moniker, seems to be engaged with the raising of spectres. She’s a manipulator of non-corporeal forces, the master of exploring those moments and objects we have no words for, and the strange blend of desire and anxiety that marks out a tune like the impossible-to-define ‘Come Back From It’ is a kind of magic in and of itself.
Gumption is the pressing weight of memory; intangible and untouchable, but ultimately impossible to ignore.
