“Quiet pop”. That’s a phrase I haven’t come across before, but it is perfect for the music that Sonnen Blume make here on Home. For if pop is often brash and obvious, hooky and groovesome, here, the music takes all of those elements and washes them out, like water being added to a watercolor painting, to leave just the barest essence of those ideas in the music – still effective, but brilliantly understated.
“The Slow Life” perhaps encompasses these ideas both lyrically and sonically. The former in its advocacy of simpler pleasures and later in its gorgeously delicate and lilting groove, a song that seems to fade in and out of solidity, sometimes lushly pop, other times drifting away into a sort of half-heard yet purposeful ambient, near-nothing.
“Green Light” might be more beat-driven, but its hushed, harmonious form is, again, as much about the atmosphere as it is about the shimmering guitar lines and liquid sonics: the Kate Bush reference is also perfect! “To Have A Pint With You” is beautifully escapist, heartachingly nostalgic, and sonically beautiful.
Plenty of music lands on my desk and makes me think, hey, that’s okay, clever, interesting, or rewarding. A smaller amount has enough about it to make me move it from the work pile to my personal collection. But rarely does an album arrive that, by the halfway point of the first song, I have already fallen head over heels in love with its sound. Yes, it is very rare, but it does happen, and it just happened with Home and Sonnen Blume.
