The love it took to leave you - Colin Stetson: Review
Review by Lavender:
Colin Stetson is a saxophonist whose experimental compositions have soundtracked some of the definitive horror movies of the past 10 years, while he's spent nearly twice that time collaborating with a wide variety of acclaimed artists. Simultaneously he's been releasing solo albums of his uncompromising sound. The newest is The love it took to leave you his first purely solo recording since 2017's All This I Do For Glory. It also follows last year's standout When we were that what wept for the sea, one of my favorite of Stetson's projects to date.
Coming into this album I was pretty excited based on both Colin's reputation and the two singles. Opener and title track The love it took to leave you didn't blow me away at first but it's at its best serving as a table setter for the album. It's got a surprisingly methodical undertone pacing away while bizarre and blurry sax passages wander over top of it. That leads perfectly into The Six, an incredible song I fell in love with as a single. I haven't been able to get enough of the track ever since. In a haunting way that I didn't even realize Colin was capable of the playing feels like it has to fight just to be heard which makes the eruptions of disjointed passages all the more impactful. When it all comes together into sweeping moments of building intensity it just sounds incredible.
We probably shouldn't go any longer without talking about the record's most notable moment. The love it took to leave you is 73 minutes long and a full 22 of those minutes are taken up by the massive Strike your forge and grin. It features an impossible-to-describe buzzing that builds and creeps and wails throughout long indulgent passages of saxophone drone. The song is colossal and it's impossible to not get lost in the details of its folds. But I think becoming completely submerged in its massive walls of sound are much more of a feature than a bug.
This is one of the most brooding albums I've ever heard from Colin. Occasionally that comes from an embrace of drone music. The one-two punch of Hollowing and To think we knew from fear features a persistent pulsating boom throughout. It feels like something you're more likely to hear in a song by The Body than Colin Stetson. While the former is one of the more brooding and unpredictable the latter is distant and even darker.
Despite its many highlights though, The love is still a very long album that can occasionally feel like a bit of a chore. Some songs here feel like exhales more than anything else. The Augur comes after the opening salvo of the record with a brighter easier to digest style and Ember shifts away from the massive 20+ minutes of drone in the middle of the album. I don't specifically dislike either of these tracks, but the range of their capabilities feels limited.
There's also passages like Malediction and Green and grey fading light that come one after another just before Strike. Again while neither are bad, they fail to blow me away with their cloudier and more imprecise meditations on Colin's distinctive style.
Don't get me wrong, I like this record and there's a lot that it does right. Fans of anything Colin has done in the past should absolutely give this a listen if not for its highlights alone. Though the album does reinforce itself well to help those highlights feel fully realized, the entire runtime of this thing can sometimes feel like an impediment to its success. In particular, because much of its best material comes before the massive drone that seems like a near-optimal finale. Still even with a more mixed tracklist than usual, there is nobody else capable of providing the levels of precise sonic horror that Colin specializes in, and The love it took to leave you is no different. 7/10
For more jazz check out my review of Nala Sinephro's Endlessness
