Elanors : Movements
“I still don’t know what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is: I don’t wanna know. Some things are just best left unsaid. I’d like to think that they were singing about something so beautiful that it couldn’t be expressed in words, and it makes your heart ache because of it…” Red, The Shawshank Redemption
The songs are in that area of beauty that is reserved for the serendipitous and the chance occurrences that glimmer in the mind: a butterfly crawling out of its chrysalis in a sun shower; a rainbow over the empty span of a river; swinging in sync on a swing set with a girl who years later will come to marry you. These are the kind of events that The Elanors’ Movements describes indirectly. The songs give the same feeling of sun-dried dew after a rainstorm, not in their words, but just by their sound. The language of the lyrics is overtaken by the incredible classic beauty, like when Cinderella enters the ball and all of the other disturbances are fuzzed out, leaving questions unanswered, but the questions were pointless anyway.
Movements is cut cleanly and without the least bit of draw away or fringe at the edges. Of course this is not unique in any way, editing can take away a lot, but it is as if the instrumentation and vocals never needed any mixing. Lead vocalist Noah Harris and his wife Adriel Harris, who picks up vocal duties on the track “Thieving Kings” and sings backing vocals throughout the album, have voices that can flutter just above and let every flap of their wings give an incredible glimpse at the intricacy of the design on their wings. They have all of the exactness of operatic arias without the overbearing highs and lows that come with them, and instead hover at that area where its possible to still touch them with the tickle of fingertips assisted by a slight hop.
To try and ask a question to Movements is surely a futile effort. It is a song after all. Music doesn’t have a mouth, but if the album did have a mouth, it would speak in an English so foreign in its articulation and astonishing in its simple proficiency that it could only be heard as music, passing by and through ears that enjoy the sounds, but can’t translate it into ideas that can be expressed in language. The meter of Elanors’ speech is classic enough for the beauty of the Gods, but is accessible to even the Groundlings.
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Judah Johnson – Be Where I Be
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