A beautiful, delicate fifth LP from the Los Angeles singer-songwriter, friend and collaborator with Sufjan Stevens with whom he shares a stylistic resemblance, here with themes on life's fragility, second chances, and picking up the pieces after an undiagnosed illness forced him to re-learn basic abilities. “I'm trying to figure out who I am now,” De Augustine says. “I feel like I may have been given a second chance at life, and I'd like to live it.” He had to learn to walk, talk, hear, play and sing again, so it’s a remarkable recovery with gorgeous high-voiced songs reminicent of Nick Drake or early Paul Simon, from opener and past Song of the Day Empty Shell, capturing this gossamer-thin, life-clinging situation accompanied, as with several of the tracks, by acoustic guitar and chamber strings: “Where do you run when your life’s on the line? Nowhere to cling to to focus your mind /Noise in your brain /Words on the page / Bury the needle past marrow and bone /Relax into meadows neath stars dead and gone / To cope with your loss /And pay off the cost.” Pet Cemetery, set in the resting place of the beloved animals of the famous, has a profound, gentle tone: “Now you feel the spirits all around you / Ghost riders in the dead of night / The steed who carried the lone ranger over silver skies / Kabar the Great Dane of Valentino / Humphrey Bogart’s friendly canine / Where your best friend bids you farewell / Only to materialize.” Every one of the 10 track is a delicate gem, but other highlights include The Cure, which addresses a visitor’s awkwardness during his illness, to the psychedelic country drone and reflections and fears about the meaning of existence in Mirror Mirror (“All of my life I have been afraid / Of losing touch and fading away / Not like Herbert Welles or Robert Cormier / More like a stranger with nothing to say / An invisible face”), or the gentle, vivid optimism Spirit of the Unknown: “I’ve been waiting for the winter’s end / And the time when spring will come again / All your life’s a distant memory Freckles on your cheek / The soil and the seed / Another melody.” With an accompanying short film, Can I Come Back Down to Earth? from start to finish this is a release that’s subtly vivid, delicious, profound, tender and utterly gorgeous. Out on Asthmatic Kitty Records.
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