Essex Honey is probably too eclectic to sound like the music you grew up with, but it certainly feels like it. “Regressing back to times you know/ Playing songs you forgot you owned,” Dev Hynes sings on ‘Westerberg’, a key line on an album that digs through memory by interpolating songs from acts including Replacements, Yo La Tengo, Elliott Smith, and Everything But the Girl’s Ben Watt. Just as evocative are the variably abstract passages of piano and cello, the first instruments Hynes ever played. Foggy, fatigued, yet clear-eyed, Blood Orange’s first record since Angel’s Pulse vaguely revolves around returning to a formative place in the wake of grief, struggling to hold anything in its grip. Yet slipping through the cracks, and the sadness, are memories that offer relief even if you can’t quite place them, as well as a cast of familiar voices that may seem distant but help in embracing it. Hynes’ music should have hardened with the passage of time, but it’s never flowed more gently.
1. Look at You
The starting point is tricky for Hynes, who begins singing over tender synths and gets all the way to a chorus before letting it dissolve, only to reemerge with practically another song. Opting, instead, for softly strummed guitar, he wonders, “How can I start my day/ Knowing the truth/ ‘Bout love and a loss of youth?” And the question behind the question: What does it mean to mull it over into a body of work?
2. Thinking Clean
Counter to its title, there’s something purposefully jumbled about the track, which haunts one of the album’s most danceable moments with its bridge – refrain? – “I don’t want to be here anymore.” The beat melts into a cello coda inviting comparisons to Arthur Russel, digging harder into the past.
3. Somewhere in Between
Echoing the opening track, Hynes tries harder to articulate a listless, liminal feeling: “So I surrender to being just a body with tired limbs/ When the world is in your hand you can’t be inside of it.” He can’t pretend to know where everything ends, he admits, driving the point home by pasting in another oddly disconnected coda.
4. The Field
Gorgeously sun-kissed and instantly nostalgic, ‘The Field’ is built on a sample of the Durutti Column’s ‘Sing to Me’, further softened by the voices of Caroline Polachek and Daniel Caesar. The singing is so lovely, the memory so clear, that you almost forget how tangled everything around it is.
5. Mind Loaded
Hynes quickly bounces back from weightlessness, aided by Polachek in the emotional transition, and bringing along Lorde and Mustafa to deliver a stunning Elliott Smith interpolation – “Everything means nothing to me” – that ends up sitting at the heart of Essex Honey. The dance between the song’s intermingling elements has a relieving effect, until the burden catches up to him, hunching down; hiding.
6. Vivid Light
Without looking into it, you wouldn’t necessarily know it’s Mustafa once again offering backing vocals on ‘Vivid Light’, which also features a notable guest appearance from author Zadie Smith. In the same way, you may not gather that the song revolves around writer’s block – though muted, it’s hardly bereft of musical ideas. Yet Hynes finds much more precise language for it: “Nothing makes it better/ Still you try and book a room/ Hoping something comes to you/ And still you’re dry.” Something as small as a watery synth, of course, can make a difference.
7. Countryside
Questing still for a feeling of aliveness, Hynes returns to the countryside as a place of refuge, seeking comfort in the forest. If the beat mirrors the flow of air in and out of his body, ‘Countryside’ is more relaxed, but tightens as the vision seems to fade and doubt creeps back in.
8. The Last of England
After a whole lot of scene-setting, ‘The Last of England’ is contextualizing, making perfect sense in the middle of the album. It opens with a recording of Hynes’ sister and mother talking about the Beatles during their last Christmas together, subtly foregrounding the fact that Essex Honey was largely informed by the death of his mother. The juxtaposition between the soft piano and a sudden breakbeat is almost cruel, as time would have it. “My sister understands just how it feels,” he sings, and if she is supposed to be embodied by the backing vocalist, she remains uncredited. “Nothing more to do but leave, following the corners of the room.” “Room” rhymes better with “took’,” a word accented so strikingly here, but you could naturally substitute it with “memory.”
9. Life
Over a lurching rhythm, Hynes enlists Tirzah and Charlotte Dos Santos for an oddly seductive moment on the album. Yet the romance feels like a distraction as he’s “phasing all the blue out,” the colour still spilling over the music.
10. Westerberg
After interpolating the chorus of The Replacements’ ‘Alex Chilton’ via call-and-response, Hynes lands on a crushing realization that almost gives the impression of linear healing: “You squint to see the truth/ That there’s no longer your youth/ Got more things to do.” But the song eventually circles back to the hook from ‘Thinking Clean’, fuller and more devastating than before.
11. The Train (King’s Cross)
What better way to signal this transitional moment than with a song called ‘The Train (King’s Cross)’ (albeit one that sneakily incorporates street sounds recorded in New York)? With Polacheck back into the fold, the track kicks into motion with gently strummed guitar, dreamy woodwinds cresting over its indie rock backbone. The lyrics are riddled with anxiety and surrender, but Hynes keeps up the pace.
12. Scared of It
Blood Orange appeared on the last two Turnstile records, imbuing their hardcore with a hazier feel, and Brendan Yates returns the favor on a song sampling Ben Watt’s 1982 track ‘Slipping Slowly’. Beatless but comfortable in its solitude, the song awkwardly weaves in Yates’ voice, which is steeped in despondency but not quite gelling with everything around it.
13. I Listened (Every Night)
A slinky bass line instantly renders the song as one of the album’s most buoyan, but really every element blends together with beautiful clarity. Lorde comes back to harmonize over the lines, “Falling out the way/ Something made you stay/ Time will change you.” Essex Honey, then, doesn’t sound amorphous so much as mutable, a wavering subject to time.
14. I Can Go
Ilford, the place where Hynes spent his childhood, is also where he received classical cello training, and the instrument holds a spiritual resonance throughout Essex Honey. He plays it, of course, but he’s not alone: Cæcilie Trier’s cello is a graceful presence across the album, and on the final track, which grants permission to let go, he invites fellow classically trained cellist and experimentalist Mabe Fratti. Her singing – the only non-English passage on the album – has symbolic as well as aesthetic value. For Mustafa’s closing vocal, a feathery synth and guitar take over, and once it’s gone, a bit of twinkling piano. You go, but the sounds only get lodged deeper into your brain.
