(2022) Beneather - Beneather  



Review:
North London multi-instrumentalist Lewis Young dives deep into cinematic ambient pop with his solo project Beneather, presenting a self-titled debut album full of disintegrating whispers, aquatic mixes, and vaporous atmospheric songs that explore liminal spaces. At their core, Young’s songs are minimal indie rock, with simple electronic drum patterns setting the tempo for spacious guitar, soft vocals, and slight bass lines. Every element, and sometimes the entire mix, however, gets saturated with various processing, gelling into an otherworldly swim of reverb and haze. This can result in moody, nocturnal tracks like “Dreamgaze,” which captures the same distant foreboding feeling of Chromatics and wraps it with the icy yearning of Sigur Rós. “Colour Me the Same” is similarly heavy, submerging a Radiohead-esque chord progression and vocal melody in gallons of processing and filling out the watery space with a spare bass line and a repeating sample of what could be a Gregorian monk chanting, or someone crying out in lonely anguish. The majority of Beneather tends toward uneasy tones, but Young offsets the heaviness with moments of lush blissfulness. “17 Sinners” is a slow, euphoric groundswell of textures that builds instrumentation as it goes. The song warbles like a long-forgotten cassette being played after years in storage, and Young’s cooing, Grouper-indebted vocals are hard to discern from the waves of keyboard, synth pads, and guitar, until the guitar glides into the forefront midway through the song. The moods and reflections presented throughout Beneather are always fuzzy and slightly obscure, but Young’s restrained composition leaves just the right amount of space for listeners to either dig deeper into the cloudy feelings or get pleasantly lost in the blur.  — AMG


Track List:
01 - Witness Marks
02 - Dreamgaze
03 - Colour me the same
04 - Melts into Air
05 - Tome
06 - Unloved Club
07 - Halycon Tide
08 - Land & Sea
09 - Maid of Eritrea
10 - 17 Sinners


Media Report:
Genre: ambient
Country: London, UK
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits


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