A Weather Everyday Balloons (Team Love)
4/5
By: Stephen Maughan
If you have ever spent a few wasted hours lying on the grass staring at the floating clouds, waiting and praying for a dazzling white sunbeam to burst through them direct to your heart, this is the album for you.
A Weather's second album Everyday Balloons may fuel singers Aaron Gerber and Sarah Winchester's fragile and poetic state of mind, but you have got to admire their determination to make the world a better place, despite the bleakness in everyday life.
Everyday Balloons starts off not exactly with guns blazing, but as energetically as A Weather are likely to get with the 6 minute 20 seconds of 'Third of Life', a quite charming song about the sunlight coming through the window and lacking courage and faith to change your life (“Oh my God, I'm giving up...” Gerber confesses, before Wincheseter kicks in “Hey, don't sweat!”).
It concludes with 'Lay Me Down', which clocks in at over 7 minutes, a beautiful yet sombre piece where our duo sing in sweet harmony “I have no right to be so tired, I slept all night and I'm exhausted – did you have to be so strong? And Jesus just between you and me...if you could help me, that would mean a lot”. In between are nine ambitious and dedicated songs, which are given room to breathe and explore the album’s key themes of the intriguing mix of despair and faith.
Musically, you could pick any of these eleven tracks and get a somewhat reassuring sense of the album. This is no mix-and-match LP, but a confident and elegant collection that is worth the time needed to fully appreciate this subtle piece of work. The production of Adam Selzer (M. Ward) blends A Weather's politic lyrics, with a quite extraordinary soundtrack which lets the instruments supplement the lyrics perfectly.
The flaws of this, if you wish to call them flaws, are that it can feel a tad too similar. It will take many listens before you could distinguish between the songs, indeed the first few times I heard this I was surprised I was already on track 4, convinced it was all one long song. It can also be tough to hear the lyrics at times, for so much is going on musically, and finally the ongoing threat of fatigue lingers throughout the album. Saying all that for some what I see as flaws will be the very essence of what makes this thing so special.
As Gerber sings “Welcome to another world where you don't have to leave the house to go to work” I find myself staring at the clouds thinking about my own mortality and the purpose of life, which is hinted here in various themes – God, nature, love, and to simply live free from pressure.
Artists in this article: A Weather
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