Review: A Whisper In The Noise - To Forget

To Forget sounds caught within the wake of emotional destruction. It’s that initial clamber onto weary legs after the desolate blow of heartbreak; still undoubtedly hurt, but just starting to sense those initial tingles of regained strength. Its movements are fragile and cautious, with instruments guided softly into life but self-restricted into fluid and comfortable gestures. Any dynamic ascents are slow and plentifully pre-warned, and all melodies fall within the graceful and cosy boundaries of pop. There’s an imminence that brings the patient rise of post rock to mind (occasionally inflected with the gliding minor keys and cymbal wash emphasis of Mono or Explosions In The Sky), but without the turbulence and climactic impact that follows, as if A Whisper In The Noise are too emotionally wasted to generate the necessary velocity.

The notes of both instruments and voices are dragged out like sighs; each is left to reflect on its own inevitable decay, with guitar strums and piano chords fading melancholically to become mere murmurs of tone. The vocals feel all the more brittle for sounding out into the empty spaces that result, dripping out as a warm hush pitched just barely above a whisper, swirled into their own reverb and ghostly double-tracking. It’s ethereal, but there’s sturdiness within the melodic simplicity that prevents that album feeling wispy and distant; the tracks of To Forget begin as a gas before solidifying under the assertion and significance brought on by repetition and a slight streak of “catchiness”. Admittedly some of these melodies feel too generic and cosy to achieve a particularly penetrative depth (“A Sad, Sad Song” springs to mind in this respect), but more often than not, A Whisper In The Noise find a way to channel a unique and broken soul into To Forget’s steady unfolding.