Joe Galen comes from Manchester and, for ears bombarded by American accents, even when performers themselves aren’t American, his Mancunian accent is the first wonderfully arresting element to grab me. Like much of the instrumentation across For Triangles, that voice is untrained and bordering on naïve, but beautifully relevant and draws you in with its intimacy.
The most obvious precedent for Galen’s work is Tunng. He mines a similar vein of heavily processed acoustic folk and uses a similar layering of warm vocal melodies and harmonies. Instrumentation revolves around finger-picked acoustic guitar, but there is plenty of room available for the usual suspects of glockenspiel, flute, violin, mandolin and the like. None of these sounds is usually left to its own devices, however. Fragments are spun upside-down, backwards and inside-out, glitched, phased, chopped and restructured into an endless tapestry of small flailing fragments. Piled on these are synthetic elements of blips and washes as well as stuttering rhythms (the odd clunky snare or kick sound being one of my few criticisms of the album). Importance is obviously placed on the lyrical content and, in many cases, these see Galen glorifying the everyday. “And we can feed the dogs/I don’t really give a fuck/We can eat fish and chips/If you want/I’ll lick you lips” he muses in ‘Fish & Chips’, making the awkward romantic and vice-versa. Or “Song for triangles and friendship and brotherhood/Here’s a reason/So for God’s sakes/Stuff breaks and…can’t you listen” as the title track gets all melancholy. “To be fair it’s not that fair at all”. The odd turn of phrase deemed clear and triumphant by the musical context of woozy strings and muted brass. But then a track like ‘Spun Circles’ plays out, building piano harp, synth and strings in such a glorious manner demonstrating Galen’s ability to communicate emotion with sound alone.
There is a great analogy between the music on For Triangles and its artwork. The cover image is a semi-photoshopped, semi-actual collage of naïve drawing, photocopied and magazine sourced images, circles of cut-up wrapping paper, confetti, cartoons and a cardboard name-tag. The mix of handcrafted ephemera and digital manipulation is very apt and is as much fun as the music.
Adrian Elmer
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