Featuring a seductive, expressive and soft vocal that’s not a million miles away from the singing style of Tim Bowness (solo artist, and one half of no-man with Steven Wilson), equalisation (aka Tim Pitt) releases Lampedusa.
Straight away I’m reaching for my thesaurus to look up more interesting synonyms for ‘lush’, ‘opulent’ and ‘gorgeous’. But then I realise that, actually, these words are doing a pretty fine job of describing the soundscape that has been created here.
We move through a rainforest of peeps and whistles, and mellifluous pads and rivers of reverb to a rhythmic and insistent percussive loop, before we suddenly stumble across a quite dark and menacing forest of threatening slabs of buzzing, fizzing bass synth that mark a heavy shift in mood.
Tim Pitt helpfully leaves a hashtag for the track on Soundcloud: ‘electronic blues’, and that does an interesting job of trying to skewer the genre. It’s certainly incredibly chilled, ambient and trippy, but there’s also some serious intellect and muscle being brought to bear.
I presume that the featured Sean Taylor is the silver-larynxed vocalist employed here, bemoaning the perspective that we are ‘Taught to be callous / And told to despise / Those who are different / To you and I’. It’s a terrific performance of an intelligent and moving lyric that cuts to the core of human experience.
Lampedusa has a big, warm heart that resonates powerfully from beginning to end. This song has something to say, and says it beautifully. It’s getting a lot of love on Soundcloud and deservedly so.
Download or stream the track here. Find & follow equalisation on Facebook.
