Darling Remember is an album to savour. It is extremely refined and listenable — easy to devour in one during a journey somewhere — but you should take the time to really enjoy it without distraction. The songs are beautifully textured and artistically structured, its elements and components intelligently and unobtrusively juxtaposed. The phrasing is carefully shaped and mildly surprising in all the right sorts of ways.
For such a big sound, the instrumentation is reasonably light, with interjections from a soulful Leslie organ and a rather moreish Rhodes electric piano. The lead guitar tones could occasionally do with more grit, but nothing is overplayed and the sounds tumble in with confidence, clarity and finesse. There is lots to listen to within the music, and if you enjoy good rock (especially ’60s and ’70s), you will probably want to put it on a lot.
Some of the songs seem to be based around a tonality as much as a chord progression, and the real treat for careful listeners is how this is achieved, in the way that the instruments interact with each other melodically. These individual, semi-improvised melodies have something different to say from the rest of the band, deviating from what you might momentarily anticipate. The vocal lines themselves aren’t particularly memorable, but some rather tasty harmonies thicken out the texture, and the vocals fit into the songs and the genre well.
Notably, there is some very fine keys work on this album. There isn’t enough proper use of keys in contemporary music — and I mean proper, clever, dextrous piano- and organ-playing, like this — so it’s refreshing to hear these instruments used with such a prominent and natural sound. In fact, all the instruments are so carefully captured, expressing the essence of their ‘real’ sounds, rather than adapting electronic replications. Each instrument has been well-respected and given its own significance.
Thus Far Along the Way, the penultimate track, is an instrumental that really allows Gardiner to show off his orchestration and make use of all this wonderful instrumentation. The ideas are spectacular — but frustratingly, just in this one track, it somehow doesn’t quite pull off the desired effect. Perhaps the tempo is just slightly rushed, or the distant drums lacking definition? It would make an amazing piece to hear live, however, with Gardier’s clever, Floyd-esque augmented and diminished chords supplanting conventional choices, and constant changes of colour and feel — not to mention a rocking organ solo. But as a studio recording, it seemed a little too earnest.
But I’m probably being pedantic. Certainly, none of this will stop me from listening to it again. Gardiner introduces tonal and textural changes because they’re interesting and because they sound good, not because he’s following a conventional structure. It’s a proper work of art. To find an album of music in this style, this well done, appearing in 2020 is brilliant. It’s proper music. Actually, I’m going to put it on again now.
