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Some people write songs because they see music as a way of getting noticed, perhaps rich, possibly even famous. Others write songs because they have no other option; the songs need to be written to express thoughts, exercise demons, order their own brain, and maybe even to make sense of the world. Bryan Dubay is one of those sorts of people, one for whom the muse will descend whether bidden or not, and the process of fitting a new piece of the sonic puzzle into place begins.
“All Our Lives” is taken from his new album, Come Clean, and it sees him as difficult to pin down as ever, stylistically speaking. The album itself is a mercurial and marvelous mix of what has previously been described as everything from post-indie to cerebral folk-rock to indietronica to simply… jangly. These are all perfectly applicable labels, yet they are only one small part of the story.
This new one drives along on a confident beat on to which Dubay hangs all manner of ambient tones and chilled textures – shimmering guitars and floating sonics, hazy and warm vocals, and drifting electronica. It is a song that builds its musical mass not through sudden movements and unnecessary volume or velocity but more through the accumulated weight of gossamer layers of music, one on top of the other, to create translucent and opaque musical hues that shift and change as those tones and textures move and merge.
If it is the job of a single to convince the listener that they should buy the album that spawned it, then this, like his other recent singles, has done its job perfectly.
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