THE ZEPHYRS – bright yellow flowers on a dark double bed

(CD, acuarela)

The Zephyrs bring on the beautiful strings for the ballad right there in the first song (“Dancing Shoes”) before kicking it off a little faster in the second song (“Hell’s dark hall”), where they bring in a horn section. But whatever they’ll do somewhere along the line they’ll turn back to a wonderful harmony chord change or melodic invention all of which drenched in melancholy and world weariness. Moving between the balladesque and the orchestral, the Sixties folk beat and the modern, european country, “bright yellow flowers …” offers a rich collection of songs with enough variety to make them lovable. It might be a sort of prarie-music, if there is prairie somewhere between Portugal and Scotland. Makes me think that The Zephyrs are a bunch of travellers, unpacking their guitars and strumming those minor chords at every beach, club or city intersection that has enough place for a crowd of people. Every other song contains hints at highways, moving or travelling.

Stuart Nicol’s voice remains in the background, sometimes mumbling, sometimes pronouncing more clearly, but always as if silently singing to himself. If he’d go lower with his voice and the instruments would take on a more brooding, dark and urban wavelength, The Zephyrs would start to stray deep into the area that has been set by The National. But Nicol’s voice still remains a little of that juvenility and bickering hope that betrays the hopeless romantic, that even the hardest fights and experiences can’t destroy. At times he quivers like the singer from Souled American, at other times he sounds quite astute and concered. And the words he sings are intruguingly beautiful pictures of lost loves, lives, friends and meaning that convey massive stories with just a few hints of what his or has happened. So that in “Dancing Shows” after the knife fight there are the lines “and every cut is wet / in the blood you let / I heard them whisper that maybe I would die”. Or the deepness of a line like “How many portions can you bring back from the buffet above / do you truly believe that all this ill will form a limited stock” (from “Ganeesha”). With an album title like that, that is the least you can expect, can’t you?

But Nicol is also the songwriter, and I marvel at his clear eye for structure and concept in a song, because there are no loose ends in any of them. If there is such a thing as compactness in songs, then he has mastered the craft. Like Leonard Cohen, who at times labored a decade or longer at a special song, but if it came through finally, they stand like monuments. So wether there are dooming electric guitars in the back, strings or horns, almost nothing but the acoustic guitar in the song, or even a crowd-singing as on “A friend”, the songs stay as single blocs, with clear vision and finely arranged to the effect of making all the songs bigger than life (another Leonard Cohen treat there). Therefore the instrumental “What voltage is the moon” started to become my highlight – or culminating point of reference – on this record. Or take the staggering instrumental section of the last song “so called beau” (there is another secret bonus song on the disc after that) that runs into a thundering roll of bass, cello and guitars, which – while still just a little breeze in comparison to e.g. Godspeed! – works like thunder in the context of this record.

At times you might say, that this focus or concentration on the essence of a song, no matter how slow and melancholic it might get, makes the songs too short or end before their due time. A strange feeling that is; expecting a long winded extortion of emotionality and instead being cut off in time and having a second one begin. Maybe it is just because nowadays a lot of bands are unable to judge the correct point in time when a song is over and then drag it on and on and on. With The Zephyrs the judgement is usually in the other direction. Only rarely do they intercept a three-verse song with one verse of instrumental or get into an epilogue of any mentionable proportions. On the other hand, they are quite akin to playing a decent intro to a song and they do use violin or guitar solos, but always without any sense of improvisation. Which is just fair, because they also have the quality of writing a decent song. And nothing destroys a good song easier than foolish or loose interpretation. A danger that The Zephyrs won’t fall into.

Could be that "bright yellow flowers ..." turns out to become one of those long lost and sought after classics in a few decades.