Oliver Cherer - I Feel Nothing Most Days (2019)

Sometimes, it pays to hold back a little bit. To hide a few things away. As Caravaggio knew, shadows can be uniquely illuminating. Oliver Cherer knows this too. On Weight Of The Water, the first track on I Feel Nothing Most Days, the melody is defined by its restraint, its repetitive insistence, and the song’s very real, very palpable beauty seems to be coaxed out of the shadows by Cherer’s sure and subtle control of mood. There is a chiming melancholy to the musical backcloth, and the dusty, bittersweet saxophone solo that acts as the song’s coda is particularly affecting. The sound as a whole seems to reach back to some shared past, just obscure enough not to be nostalgic, but dimly recognisable nonetheless.

And that is entirely understandable, given the story of how this album came into being. Cherer literally found these songs in his attic, and some of them date back to 1984, so the dust on them is real as well as metaphorical. And in keeping with the provenance of the material, the sound throughout the album is similar to a host of British artists from the weirder and more occluded recesses of the 1980s – there are comparisons to be made with Robert Wyatt or Robyn Hitchcock, but that can be said of many of Cherer’s albums. Here the range is wider. Cherer managed to get hold of one of Vini Reilly’s old guitars, and Reilly’s band The Durutti Column are clearly an influence. For anyone au fait with the period in question, there is something distinctly Proustian about the reaction provoked. Rather than rehashing old tropes with modern production techniques, Cherer does something more subtle and slippery: he toys with the relationship between memory, music and mood.

But there are nods to the future as well as the past. A Small Town deals with both. ‘Time is working against me,’ Cherer sings amid dark and obscure portents, mysterious marks on walls, shortening days. Untitled 1983 explores the same themes, and the laid-back, almost jazzy rainy-day arrangement conceals something darker and more claustrophobic. Earth Rise is an effective piece of ekphrasis, a comment on the artistic process with a markedly hauntological feel, and its closing instrumental section is characterised by the conflict between the fluid guitar lines and the insistent percussion.

Cherer’s many gifts include an ability to write a melody that is both immediately memorable in musically challenging. There is more than a hint of Andy Partridge about him in that respect. Slowly, Slowly is a perfect example: a seemingly simple song that takes some unusual melodic directions without ever straying from the album’s consistent atmosphere. An Unfamiliar Kitchen, with its gentle acoustic guitar, has a folkier feel to it, though the lyrics have their own strangeness, similar in some ways to Scott 3 era Scott Walker’s existential tableaus, but more ambiguous and consequently more haunting.

Seberg is a tribute to French New Wave cinema, and shows a pithier side to Cherer’s songwriting that recalls early Lloyd Cole, while Most Days is a masterpiece of restraint and controlled atmosphere before a brief eruption of layered voices ushers in the song’s denouement. Closing track The Girl On The Top Of The Tree seems to anticipate what Syd Barrett might have sounded like had he continued recording for another couple of decades.

The quiet magic of I Feel Nothing Most Days is difficult to pin down, but in that essential unknowability, that sense of mystery, lies some of its appeal. In some ways it is a paradox: it reaches into the past and examines human memory but never feels anything other than thrillingly current. The songs seem half-remembered, like dreams, but are never less than perfectly crafted, and the album hangs together as a whole artistic statement despite the variety of Cherer’s songwriting. And despite its lengthy gestation, it feels like an instant, a snapshot of a rainy afternoon, slightly blurred, mysterious and beautiful.