No need to confess / Just a light in the cracks / and a little less heaviness.
The first thing you’ll want to do after you hit play on the new single from Sasha & the Bear is tell everyone else in the world to shut the hell up so you can listen again.
The delivery and vocal production on Air does what the best of folk and singer-songwriter music does—it draws you into its stillness, its quiet. But this isn’t a somber track, or even what you’d call a mellow one. I’d guess that, were we to hear Air performed live, the room would be dancing.
Hell of a thing to pull off in a song about grief.
Bit down on daylight,
but it broke like trust.
Don’t name it.
It’ll learn to sleep next to you,
slick-lipped and threadbare,
like shadows shifting out of view.
“It’ll learn to sleep next to you” is about one-and-a-half grief books of wisdom packed into a few lines. Grief is not something we can talk ourselves out of, or into. It is not something to speed up or overcome by force of will or self-destruction. Grief is to be suffered, lived inside of, and survived. The world dies, and we still have to eat, wash ourselves, and, yes, even sleep.
A choir director / vocal coach I once worked with told me, when speaking about dynamics as a singer, you don’t want to get quieter merely to lose volume and, therefore, energy—you want to draw the listener inside and far away. If you get quiet, you must also get urgent. Lose volume, sure, but gain energy. Sasha’s performance on this track is a masterful example of that kind of singing, and Dov’s choices, the mix of electronic artifact-noises and percussion with quiet-but-urgent acoustic drum grooves, make this a track to sink into.
Any fans of Sylvan Esso, Mk.gee, Julien Baker, or Katy Kirby will find a lot to love here.
The play of the drums against the if-it-isn’t-open-D-it-sure-fooled-me acoustic guitar, close recorded and full of lush lows, makes it easy to hit the end of the song and press play again. If the record coming from them this summer is more of what we got with Air, I can’t wait for summer.
Written by Willow Stonebeck
