It's a nasty habit of the rock-reviewin' humans — and, hell, swollen
media members in general — to set people against each other; like every
act must be an act of rebellion, or that every record needs to be part
of a competition. Whilst I'd normally abhor such behavior, there are
times when the lure is too strong, the siren song from the rocky rocks
of rock-criticizmo telling you that in this case, the pay-off's great.
With Adem, the thing you can't help mention is that he, Adem Ilhan, was
once in Fridge, the fresh-faced English post-post-rockers whose
late-'90s catalogue, in retrospect, seems somehow both better and worse
than it did at the time; earnest and dorkish but not without its charms,
and not as badly dated as, say, those early Mogwai records. In the
years since, his former Fridge friend Kieran Hebden has gone off to find
fame, and bloated ego, as Four Tet, making way-too-nice tazzzteful
pastoral-elecktro tunes that've got stuck with the name "folktronica."
It's a horrid neo-genre moniker, but, hey, it's not as if the music
doesn't deserve it. After years of being completely quiet, Ilhan has
made his solo debut, and, well, forget tronicks, tiger, b'cause he's
just folk; and, so, when placing these Fridge children in direct
competition with each other, it's no competition. In a year in which
underground-folk folk are about to make a massive splash on the
pop-cultural consciousness, Ilhan has made a most grand debut, swanning
onto the scene with a collection of slow, sad, stately songs whose
obvious studio smarts are dwarfed by a big bleeding folkie's heart.
Largely assembling his tunes around acoustic guitar, Ilhan knocks out
rattling ramblers and solemn laments with equal aplomb, each tune topped
off with a glorious throaty wail that immediately busts him out of
post-rock/electro's boy's-too-scared-to-sing ghetto. But, when it comes
to his words, it's obvious that Ilhan holds no hopes of passing for an
earnest folkie, whose ways're out of place in this new-millennial
setting. Whilst his disc works with a lot of folk-revivalist tones and
meters, his lyrics don't stick to traditional topics or form. In fact,
on Homesongs, Ilhan shows himself to be a master of the modern milieu,
his lyrics obsessed with the search for "home" in an age in which the
traditional family unit has broken down. "Everything You Need" is
central to such; it's a "wandering" song whose opening sentiments — "Home
is where your heart comes from/ But what d'you do when your heart's
gone/ With everything you need?" — easily address the search-for-home
sentiments Ilhan charts throughout the album, this search something he
sees in tightly-kept social circles, in maintaining
"I'll be there for you’ friendships," in holding out hopes for the future
of nascent flirtations, in the domestic intimacies of lovers, in the way
couples can be defined as an entity unto themselves, and in the friction
that comes when such homely unity is fractured. On one of this disc's
standout tracks, "Long Drive Home," Ilhan goes into the kind of
relationship-tension anecdote that recalls the early-day, mid-'90s type
work of Smog and Arab Strap, his tale one of accompanying a
love-interest along to a social gathering. Written from one side of an
opened-up schism that's come (if only for the eve) b'tween a pair, Ilhan
sings, early: "I've been smiling my best smile/ I've been laughing with
your friends/ Doing everything that you asked on the way/ And I don't know
what I've done/ But we haven't talked for hours/ And I'm waiting for the
long drive home." But, soon enough, he's no longer feeling so
on-the-back-foot, stepping forth to pose the quietly profound question:
"Do you believe in me enough to say so?", which he proffers in a
diffident whisper that dares not take such a stated stand with any sort
of defiance, for fear of the fallout, and the finality that may come
with further fracturing. Whilst such words may seem somewhat small upon
reading, they stand in for a familiar social scenario with such unerring
clarity — their evocations of petty jealousy and the silent treatment
painfully evocative — that they seem grand. Especially when married to
the music, which finds a gentle acoustic-guitar progression draped in
delicate glockenspiel, quiet piano-accordion, and sparse bass.
Such a fragile arrangement is typical of the way Ilhan goes about
assembling his Homesongs songs, songs that show him more to be an
"arranger" than a songwriter. Showing a masterful grasp of restraint
and a healthy respect for silence, Ilhan manages to go less-is-more
whilst playing a gaggle of instruments, showing a dexterous touch as he
touches up harmonium, classical harp, dulcimer, and various kinds of
hand/mallet percussion, all these assorted creams often being sweet
colorings draped around his careful strums of guitar. The most golden
moments on the record, though, are the ones where Adem strips all of
this away, beyond even the fragile measures noted before. "There Will
Always Be," the set's magical-sounding closing number, finds Ilhan's
chesty croon expelled over an accordion tune, the song intermittently
"lighting up" with spangling dangles of harp and vibraphone, which hope
to conjure the illuminative qualities of starlight as they shimmer and
glimmer with beautiful tonality. In evoking such starlight, Ilhan draws
a line back to biblical storybook storytelling, transplanting
folksinging hymnal traditions into the modern context, his offering of
"there will always be room at my table for you" less a metaphorical
pledge of spiritual allegiance to your boy Jesus, and more an open
promise, one probably promised to either the community of friends or the
specific lovers/ex-lovers of whom Ilhan so often sings. And this isn't
the only song in which there's some modern-spin spun on caroling, with
"Pillow" daintily trailing off, in its final hushed seconds, with the
melody from "Jingle Bells"; something also done with great effect by
Lisa Germano on her fabulous seasonal-drunkenness ballad "Messages From
Sophia". Here, Ilhan isn't evoking Christ's birth, but Christmas; the
twinkling tonality on this song not equating to starlight, but conjuring
up sounds equivalent to snowfalls; the sparsest strums and delicate
pluckings of harp like soft flakes slowly descending, each note unique
unto itself and unlike any other. But, where other songs set icy lyrics
against warm folk arrangements, here the cold climes are contrasted with
the album's most romantic sentiments, painting a portrait of a
night-on-the-town-together, a Christmas-season date that he sees with
escalating romanticism as the eve progresses into the early morning.
When Ilhan sings "We had a nice time/ We had such a nice time"
(re-casting a line from the earlier "Cut," where he offers "We had a
good time"), I'm reminded of the flirtations b'tween the paramours of
the masterful Michel Gondry motion picture "Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind," the word "nice" a prosaic statement, awkwardly uttered,
that doesn't come close to matching how either party is feeling. From
such, it's not long before Ilhan stars stirring up much more poetic
phrases, going from the gentle "I can't think/ Clearly/ But I saw you
smile/ I am sure I saw you smile", to the pretty "Wake me/ With
kisses/ Like butterflies"; the song's central search, for a pillow on
which to rest one's head, about the deep driving desire for love, the
notion that everything we do is a way to be loved a little more, this
bleeding into the album's beautifully painted bigger picture. Ilhan
finishes the song on the final note "Could it be I've found my home?",
which seems almost a fitting summation of the thematic qualities he
explores throughout Homesongs, an album whose quaint title turns out to
be not
just literal, but, once its sentiments set in, massively moving as
well.
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