Tag: The Line

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Westerman’s Atmospheric Meditation on Moral Relativism

With the release of his critically acclaimed Bullion-produced debut EP, Ark, the London-based singer/songwriter and guitarist Will Westerman, best known as Westerman, received national and international attention for writing material that thematically grapes with societal confines and other issues over a shapeshifting electronic backdrops. Building upon a growing profile, Westerman’s highly-anticipated full-length debut Your Hero Is Not Dead is slated for a June 5, 2020 release through Play It Again Sam and Partisan Records, across North America.

Continuing his ongoing collaboration with Bullion (a.k.a. Nathan Jenkins), Your Hero Is Not Dead was recorded in Southern Portugal and finished in London. Thematically, the album is about empathy and compassion, struggle and release, and all the ways we contradict and battle within ourselves on a daily basis — and as a result, the material is centered around moral, political and ethical gray areas with narrators, who attempt to resolve larger external issues by looking inward. Your Hero Is Not Dead’s fifth and latest single, “The Line” is brooding and atmospheric track featuring gentle layers of shimmering synth arpeggios, strummed guitar, the rising London-based artist’s expressive falsetto and a soaring hook. And while bearing a subtle resemblance to Peter Gabriel’s Security and Peter Gabriel 3, the song as Westerman explains was inspired by this thoughts on moral relativism.

“I was thinking about moral relativism when I wrote this,” Westerman says in press notes. “The ever-shifting parameters of what is and isn’t acceptable. This applies to many things – gender, human rights, parenting, politics. I don’t believe that this means there’s no right and wrong, but normative values are constantly in flux – hopefully as we continue to be more compassionate.” 

New Single by William Ruben Helms

Comprised of Phenomenal Handclap Band‘s Daniel Collas (keyboards, production) and Morgen Phalen (vocals guitar) and members of Stockholm, Sweden-based bands Dungen and The Amazing, indie psych pop act Drakkar Nowhere can trace their origins to when Collas and Phalen had been making music in the kitchen of a rented apartment in Stockholm. And in a relatively short period of time, Collas and Phalen’s kitchen-based music project caught the attention of the members of Dragen and The Amazing, who then joined the project to flesh out its sound, a sound that’s largely influenced by cosmic jazz, soul, jazz fusion, prog rock and psych pop among others — and by their direct surroundings, including the forests that surround the Bagarmossen and Midsommarkransen neighborhoods of Stockholm.

Now you may recall that I wrote about “How Could That Be Why,” the first single off the band’s forthcoming self-titled debut, and the shuffling and trippy single has the band pairing twisting and turning synths and keys, a sinuous bass line and an infectious sense of melody to craft a song that sounds as though it could have been released in 1973. The album’s second and latest single “The Line” continues on a similar vein although it has the band pairing slow burning psych pop and psych rock with 70s AM rock — and in a fashion that nods at America‘s “Horse With No Name” and Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here-era Pink Floyd but with a plaintive ache just under the song’s cosmic glow. Interestingly, the song may arguably the prettiest song the band has released to date.