Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn : Quiet In a World Full of Noise
Some artists follow their ambitions to artistic overreach. How many great novelists have we seen ascend from the 300-page modest work to the 500-page generational novel, brilliant in its ways, only to succumb to the urge to deliver something too big, too sprawling, underedited and devoid of enough ideas to sustain itself? The Clash are a notable example of the inverse of this phenomenon, increasing their workload for their career (and overall musical) high in London Calling only to produce a much larger, much messier and deeply fascinating follow-up in Sandinista!, an album that rightly has its own adherents due to the natural majesty only a great mossy work can procure. Meanwhile, on the other hand, we have Smashing Pumpkins, who in the wake of their ultimate prog-grunge alternative rock epic of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness plus The Aeroplane Flies High boxed set chased the muse of macro-scale works to increasingly diminishing returns, much as I may be fond of some of those later works.
Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn sidestep this issue with grace and aplomb on Quiet In a World Full of Noise. We were one of many publications to exuberant sing the praises of their previous collaborative LP Pigments, which grew in esteem in our own Slack channel until one by one every writer listened to and fell in love with the record. It was a concept work, of the mature style, eschewing an overarching narrative for instead a thematic and symbolic conceit, dividing a rich life into its colors and scoring them accordingly. The color choices to view a life likewise skewed literary rather than cliche; where one might expect the rainbow, instead we were treated to coral, opal, sandstone and umber. So, following solo work from Zahn, how does one reconvene to follow up such a lovely and stately record? Go more elegant, more stately.
On Zahn’s end, the ice and sunlight of his piano-driven compositions, advanced in their form on his Statues double record, here finds its true purpose, being riven with grace enough to hover in its own ambient/new age splendor but instead turned to the real star of the show. To say Dawn Richard’s already grievously wonderful vocals here deepen in their esteem is an understatement; like Sade at her peak or Dinah Washington’s brilliant rescoring by Max Richter, she has managed to both reach deeper into the blues flourishes of her voice while retaining a near-contemporary classical sense of breath, space and crystalline beauty. This is set against an ever-more personal set of lyrics, with charming references to Tar Heels basketball, the way intimate and seemingly meaningless details conjure a communion across generations, and a weariness that smiles rather than grimaces.
While one could focus on standout tracks like the title track, “Traditions” and “Breathe Out,” songs which straddle perfectly the worlds of art pop and blues, ambient and jazz, to do so would be to excise them from the grand and deliberate tapestry of the song cycle itself. By denying themselves an obvious thematic and symbolic center, Richard and Zahn instead have found something yet again more literary, the title being a gesture of the quest for peace and a blessed silence among the chaos and confusion of a life. There is a tendency in western narrative to fixate on conflict and its resolution, that the only stories worth telling are overcoming active tense battles of the body and spirit. But there is yet so much more to a life: who among us dreams more of the pitched and fraught arguments and scattered weeping of our days than of laying still in bed with your loved one, seeing light stream through the window as they sleep and grumble? Richard’s narratives, such as the tale of cancer and violence on “Life in Numbers,” are conveyed in a meditative and reflective sobriety, paired against the warm drone of a well-tuned piano gentle arpeggiating chords and melodies. There is a space between joy and pain that we discover sometimes in grief, where the fondness of memory blends in perfect ratio with the sorrow of its finality. These songs hover there, witnessing.
Each of these performers had strong catalogs of work prior to working with one another. For a decade before their collaboration, Dawn Richard had been a singer of growing esteem, blending blues, jazz, R&B, soul, pop and more. Spencer Zahn had been a composer teasing at the limit of contemporary classical and jazz composition, a perennial rich horizon. We surmised on the release of Pigments that they had perhaps found their true calling in working together, each of their abilities lifted to heights that I don’t think any of us expected were possible from either before. Quiet confirms this. Is it better than that previous record? Will it be received as warmly in reviews and awards? Irrelevant. What matters is: these two have proven this is a musical partnership that can last a long, long time and deliver a resplendently beautiful body of work.
Label: Merge
Year: 2024
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Dawn Richard & Spencer Zahn : Quiet In a World Full of Noise
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Langdon Hickman is listening to progressive rock and death metal. He currently resides in Virginia with his partner and their two pets.