You Sleep, We Creep by Grayson Gilmour

I had to stop listening to this album whilst writing. I’d be fine up till track 7, which would hit me so hard I’d have to switch topics immediately and talk about it. This was when I first got the album.

When I was more familiar with it, I wouldn’t even get to track 7. I’d written pages on it before I’d had it even a week.

You Sleep, We Creep is insinuous. It worms its way in, and it’s subtle. The final track, The Working, is probably most representative of this. It’s simple, but the way it builds, to fill out, push out and overwhelm is piercing. This is music to take you over.

In some ways I resent it having this power. Most music I feel no urge to write about. It’s rare that I need to.

There was a lot of expectation put onto this CD - my own love for Grayson’s previous work, the way a friend of mine went on about it, the delay in its coming into stock - and sometimes you have to listen to a CD a few times before you really hear it. When I first played it, it was the aforementioned track 7, a song called Waiting Room, that made me sit up and take notice. It’s a fascinating, evocative song. I had great joy trying to describe the way it builds and spirals, whilst having to accept that you caan’t really explain music. It’s hard enough to explain how it affects you. It’s a task somewhat like interpreting an ee cummings poem, and completely unnecessary. I’m sure some people, awed, can just be that.

Even in a recording, nothing is ever the same twice. But I can say this: I love this album. I love to listen to it, to lie down and feel it, to have it haunt me when I’m out walking, to write about it and to dance to it. It’s very danceable, not in the usual way but out of the intense feelings it evokes, the stories you can sense within it. I once saw a dance performance choreographed to Nick Cave songs, and I believe you could do the same thing to Grayson Gilmour.

Of course, I’m nto really even describing the music itself, or the way the album is structured. I can tell you how Oceans and Notions is about the most charming - seconds you can imagine before the curious switch in its attached ‘creep’. The tape deck noises appear nowhere else. I can tell you this, but then do I have to explain how several of the songs have other tracks linked onto them, related short pieces with no title but ‘Creep’ and the number. One song, the striking Occupation: Dreamland even has two such pieces, one on either side.

I have seen this song performed three times now, and it always gets to me. I was probably let down hearing it on the album - there was something so powerful in my memory of the chorus that the whole of the song seemed less. But you play it again, and things catch at you, it intrigues you again.

This is how I described the feeling earlier: ‘The songs won’t sit still. They will always be more; you can’t ever hold onto one idea. Because there will always be more. Because nothing is certain; because if you can read a book a thousand ways, so can you hear a song. You can go deeper. But nothing is all. Not even in intent is there an answer’. Then my verbosity was interupted by the sweetness of Oceans and Notions. Which was probably just as well. The album makes me think, but it also shakes me.

So yes, it is amazing. Yes, it is really really good and yes I could go on. Most songs I have not mentioned; I have talked very little about the quality of it, the sound itself. The trouble is I fear I could quite actually go on forever. My discussion will never end.

I can shut up, but I’ll play it again. The wonder of it will hit me all over again.

Better to throw the pen away and just listen.

xxx