We know The Pull of Autumn is excellent at making music out of conflicting sonic emotions. They blend the cavernous with the calm, the unrestrained with the understated, the dynamic and the delicate, and attractive music is born from such opposites. Teaming up with the Japanese dream pop outfit, Once Grace Forever was an excellent move that pushed them more towards one side of their usual sonic spectrum, leaning towards the gossamer and graceful, eschewing their often bigger, more bombastic urges.
Having found the band by stumbling across them on an independent radio station, Autumnal main man Daniel Darrow reached out, the bands bonded, and this track was born. The collaboration stripped The Pull of Autumn of its more raw and raucous sounds to reveal the sweetness and light that always lies, though often buried, at the band’s heart. The delicate structures which act as the template for the development of a more powerful, more weighty song. It often feels like you are witnessing the working out in the margins rather than the finished song.
But the result, “Live Today” is glorious and gorgeous, lush and life-affirming, reminiscent of bands such as Cocteau Twins and, more latterly, Warpaint. And if such collaborations take A Pull of Autumn in new, more stripped-back directions, a balance of one band’s grace and the other’s grandeur, then I’m all for it.
This joining of musical forces has also put a new band on my radar, one which, on just this first hearing, I know that I’m going to love. So I’m off to check out Once Grace Forever’s back catalogue. I may be some time.
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Outlaw Empire
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Beautiful Broken World album order
