One of the most under-rated performers operating in Europe at present, singer/ songwriter AIDAN BARTLEY has been seducing W&H with his atmospheric, orchestrally-inclined pop for several years now.
'Soulstream' is his second album, released by Berlin label Phonector in 1999. It was recorded in both his previous base Barcelona and his current home Berlin and finds him working with long-term collaborators such as Julia Bartley (piano), David Hull (double bass) and drummer/ percussionist extraordinaire Snorre Schwartz. It's also the place he begins to mine the charismatic seam of literate, evocative songcraft he's working on to this day.
To refer to Bartley as merely a 'singer/ songwriter' is rather too simplistic. As the scene-setting 'Opening' suggests, he's capable of creating music that's sombre, reflective and beautiful with room for discreet, chamber-style strings and tumbling, semi-classical pianos. His adopted base of Berlin sometimes seeps through the very pores of these songs too, not least on the surreal, Mittel-European waltz-time 'Days Like These' (“wind up the windows, melt down the plants/ mute the church bells, lock up the bats”) and – perhaps inevitably – on his dramatic, Vaudevillian Bad Seeds take of Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill's stormy 'The Soldier's Wife'. Coldplay it is not, and it's all the more glorious for that.
Elsewhere, we're treated to windswept, melancholic ballads like 'October's Bones' and the hard-won emotional blood-letting of the Hammond organ-assisted 'Not One Drop of Blood', although both are arguably outflanked by the broiling two-part epic 'Lazarus and I' with its' stunning piano, commanding vocals and references to Anne Frank. At a separate tangent, there are also songs like 'Fall' which succumb to majestic choruses and show Bartley has a firm grip of vintage pop which will always hold him in good stead.
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Perhaps the most stunning track is kept in reserve for the finale. Great widescreen pop is rarely conjured from the legacy of a victim of Stalin's Gulags, but the frostbitten elegy 'Sakhalin Island' is vivid, magnificent and beautifully observed (“the stolen years echo in the silence of the snow/ the hopes that we held melted long ago”) and provides a startling voice for those dead and long forgotten. It really is the sort of track that can bring you up short, even in these days of multi-media intrusion.
Such sombre material could easily amount to a heavy and unforgiving album, yet Aidan Bartley and his talented collaborators bring a melodic sensibility and sometimes even a lightness of touch to bear which ensures that 'Soulstream' remains on the exhilarating side of the darkness. Dive in and let its' mysterious currents caress and refresh.
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