DogGone by Tryal

Alex says that these songs are “mini-meditations on miscommunication, friendship, and the struggle to connect”, which feels right.

“Time+X” lays this out for us with its spare ode to humankind’s sweet, clumsy rituals of hanging out, reaching out, making time. Alex is of course in his special way a Sondheim interpreter of some note, and that feels significant here somehow. We can see his song’s subjects finding each other in the crowded streets and the guarded parks, making mistakes, holding on to their own, thinking they’re alone, all the while lovingly observed by this amused narrator-of-few-words.

Fact is, this is obviously, undeniably, music made by someone who loves people, which is an artistic point of view often forced (not to say faked), but we sure know the real thing when we see it. And people who love people are very often endowed with a gift for assembling them in fortuitous combinations.

So it is that TRYAL, in addition to being a vessel for Alex’s gifts as a writer and performer, brings us the beauty of Team Cole/Cartwright (easily one of my favourite rhythm sections, not that you asked), Thom Gill, Sean Donald, and Alex’s vocal group Grex, comprised here of Jill Harris, Mara Nesrallah, and Mingjia Chen. (Look, obviously the human voice’s potential for beauty is vast and various and bottomless, but surely we can agree that the way these three sing together on “I Em Wading” is… on some level… how our species was… meant to use our voices, right? Like, the fact that people can sound like this is without doubt the result of some unfathomably huge existential process going very well, right?)

Anyway, true as it ever was, this is, um, Very Good Music. Music that would never in a million years have existed if it hadn’t been made by these specific people. I can’t really think of any more fundamental criteria for what good art is supposed to be.

-Bram Gielen-

Charismatic compositions that treat electronic pop sophistication as a springboard for all manner of exploration. Lithe dream-like arrangements give way to peculiar lushness; beats dissolve into weightless melodies.