The Ayres mini-album succumbs to a temptation to unearth and render everything to speech. Keith Kenniff’ songs do resurrect a familiar sumptuous palette, a benign, shimmering soundscape, but his technique is now showcased in more of a pure form. Basic song structures are of primary concern, structures that are animated by overworked reference points, and which are devoid of strategy, content to simply seek an outlet for Keniff’ sentimentalism.
‘A Rising Wind’ shows increased interest in coherence and sonic polish, as simple percussion programming wafts along a bank of hazy, woozy chords, and are garlanded by Keniff’ soft, swooning vocals. Though a whirling energy can be generated from the human voice, Kenniff’s is without a distinctive timbre. Besotted as he is by tales of lazy days and soft melancholy, his voice too often achieves contiguity with the sensitive – and, it must be said, rather banal – indie boy model.
Consequently, there is little space in these pieces for any manoeuvring to take place. With its blustery washes of oscillating tones, leavened by buoyant keyboard melodies and ramshackle digital rhythms, ‘The Obeisant Vine’ perfectly mimes a moonstruck melancholy. So perfectly, in fact, that it seems little else but the effervescence of signs which exhausted their meaning long ago. Wherever these songs venture, be it to realms of snow-blind ambience, celestial luminosity or gauzy pastoralism, its step is never anything less than precise – but it’s also never anything more than frozen and predictable.
Max Schaefer
