Written by: Dave Cantrell
When one encounters the sharp soothingness of pop-exquisite songwriting that’s matched by the whole holistic impact that comes with its equally exquisite production and presentation and that entire package is presented with a boisterous humility that itself essentially says ‘Hey, y’know, no big deal, really, but still, ain’t it great?!,’ well, that’s when you know you’re, one, standing deep inside the sweetest of pop’s sweet spots and, two, you may be so deeply entranced you’ll have to be physically dragged out of it, all of which is to say, welcome to Double Exposure, the latest James Hoare-helmed Penny Arcade album, just released on the ever-estimable (i.e. essential) Tapete imprint.
Whereas, of course, given our predilections here at SEM, we’ve been down this none-more-well dug rabbit hole before (three befores, in fact, here, here, and here) we still weren’t suitably prepared to find ourselves swimming in quite such sublime pop depths as Double Exposure, well, exposed us to. Which, y’know, no surprise given the one-man gem factory that Hoare has built over the years – hit those links just above – but still, even given all that, it’s still actually kind of difficult to not be some level of amazed.
With first track “Regrets” we begin, of all places, in a bright churning furrow that suggests we’ve ventured into what one might reasonably call the ‘Velvet Arcade’ and what a wonderfully irresistible place to find ourselves, grooving inside a darkness that we swear is made out of light. In short? Purely goddamned excellent. And on we go.
“Memory Lane,” built on a hypnotically skeletal frame – drum machine (ubiquitous in the structures here and quite effectively so) set on ‘metronomic minimalism,’ synth strings sawing sympathetically along, the whole thing creeping in to one’s bloodstream in a Young Marble Giants kind of way and, no, there ain’t a hint of hyperbole here, just the god honest truth.
Be it “Worst Trip,” following, that hangs swaying in the ether like the pop ghost of melancholy becoming sentient inside your headphones; “Everything’s Easy” hanging in one’s inner ear with an immediate ease that invokes the ghost of Neil Young’s “Old Man” and will likely hang inside this listener’s head for as long as that song has which is pretty much forever [personal note: Young’s 1972 LP Harvest from which that referent was among the first five albums your then-sixteen year old correspondent bought with his own money]; the way the brief instrumental “Early Morning” can’t help but betoken, if glancingly, “Here Comes the Sun” as it traipses thorugh the headphones with what could well be called a ‘diaphanous strength;’ how “Time” represents its namesake with a subtly passing, rather fatalistic grace (time is on your side but there’s only so long / you can take it before it’s gone) or how the gentle jarringness of “We Used to Be Good Friends” could not better underline that complex mess wherein sorrow and relief band together to bring the heart to a place of reluctant acceptance or the way “Riverside Drive” closes proceedings with a deft tone that invokes resurrection as much as denouement, as if ‘ending’ isn’t necessarily the end (we can ride away/ we can ride away, today) depending as it does on what’s on the other side of that doorway.
Overall, built inside a sonic shell made of equal parts love, vulnerabiltiy, resignation and acceptance, Double Exposure presents as a diaristic excursion through, if you will, the aesthetic psyche of the artist, panoramic but intimate, a journey in this case always unstrayingly guided by an intuitive songwriting sense that has but a handful of equals in the higher ends of the indiesphere. On one hand it’s a one-man-band seeking an orchestra while on the other it’s an absolutely, exquisitely realized piece of work that entrances from the get-go and never lets go of that gently but self-assured grip, all of which, yes, points to this album being something of a gentle masterpiece and it is indeed that down to its syncopated bones.
