Tourist - Everyday

February 15, 2019 - Monday Records

Tourist debuted his second full-length album Everyday, fittingly enough, on Monday Records. The album takes the path of late 19th - early 20th century literature, providing vignettes of arbitrary moments. Tempting thoughtful listeners to prod for plot, the album, winging on its title tracks explores the organic inner drama of nondescript moments. Whether or not there is something to be found beyond sympathy and an intimate musicality, is in my mind, not up for debate, but I am of a generous nature. So, we’ll see.

‘Awake’ stirs open the album with gently orchestrated white noise harboring faint twinkles of melody and distorted vocals which occasionally approach coherence. It’s a perfectly titled track, with instrumentation stretching the gamut, Everyday finding its range of motion and coming to. Not a great club track, but romantic and sleepy at once—a pillow talker.

Without changing momentum at all, we slide into ‘Emily,’ the second track, which lays down ‘Awake’ as a background and starts to build some more melodic continuations out of the nascent pieces. Dancy non-committal snare adds a real Gemini quality to the track, while the vocal samplings and synths add a little Taurus and Pisces respectively. And just when a person thinks that fire signs are going to go unrepresented in ‘Emily,’ some real willful synths pop in to establish a hard and fast riff and we get a sense of her natal chart, housing a little Leo.

‘Someone Else’ rolls in riding the same white noise background established in ‘Awake,’ and the first suggestions of narrative bubbles up. Suspicions point towards domesticity complicated with life outside of the domicile. With ASMR quality, a deep intimacy is established through what presents as randomized clicks, static and vocal snippets, but ultimately reveals careful orchestration. A sun-beaming pitch warbles faintly out of the noisy shimmer, and eventually, with help from the title, a voice repeating “someone else” becomes clear. It’s never a comforting phrase to have hauntingly dropped into what seems like a relationship theme. The question this early on is, in what capacity are we presented with this elegiac refrain. A little over halfway through, an arpeggiated progression appears with high school pining driving hard and ending with some morning bird calls.

‘Love Theme’ comes on with a lot of momentum and holds within it many buried layers which on the surface translate as rehashing of the elements from the three previous songs. The vocals are unclear, and it's tough to suss anything more than musical themes going on in ‘Love Theme.’ Perhaps that’s the point. In the turbulence of oncoming emotion, so much becomes fragmented but inevitably comprising a cogent series. The fourth track’s transition into the next is the first break in instrumentation in the album. Each track previously piggybacked of its predecessor. The end of ‘Love Theme,’ provides a full stop.

Yet ‘Pieces’ makes thematic continuity out of the temporary silence, presenting sparser instrumentation and picking back up the household ambience from the first half of the album. Brightly dissonant and sparkling with atonality, ‘Pieces’ features a stuttering male “I’ve always — I’ve always felt like” — the lyric ends there. Tourist brings difficult conversation into the composition and draws out emotional complexity, where the drama often lives in that which  a person struggles or fails to articulate. A long time is spent ambling in the more scattered elements of the song, which finds harmonious answers between haunting, melancholy, and chipper. With what might be irony, ‘Pieces’ tapers off to a steady four-four beat before leading into the next track, finding stability and rhythm with its most basic and non-musical piece.

‘Gin Under the Sink’ starts off with some apropos drippy under the sink noises and opens into a medley of visceral percussion, harpish plucks, nearly intelligible vocals. This track is an exploratory mission, independent of melody and unglued with rhythm. It’s rare to find such slice-of-life scores, verging on mumblecore, festering with mystery and complexity as does Everyday. ‘Gin Under the Sink’ as much as it would disrupt any day, disrupts the search for a narrative arc and grounds the album in its commitment to the piecemeal.

Aside from the song, here are a few things we know about gin under the sink. It's got no formalized home within the home. The gin is not part of a personal bar, which means that it’s not for entertaining guests. Which leads us to the notion that its purpose is strictly spur of the moment. It’s either intended to celebrate something unforeseen or to cope with it.

That said, here comes the sun, or in other words ‘Apollo.’ Faint gasps and a slow influx of ambient and twinkling synths epilogue gin under the sink, quickly assimilating into a marimba groove. ‘Apollo’ is a dancer. Rejuvenation lies at the heart. What else is there to say. Sometimes a thing just feels good.

Edging its way towards the dance floor, Everyday follows up with ‘Hearts.’ A simple punching rhythm lays mostly bare, infectiously so, for the first minute. ‘Hearts’ is a natural progression from ‘Apollo,’ continuing with enlightening chords, blearily joyful. In a way it’s a relief. So much of the album seems to teeter towards the bleak, only to come through with a fullness of heart. This track however, starts and ends with that fullness. Even though I don’t know who I’m rooting for, there is a strong feeling that I do. And I’m sorry to say it, but Everyday points out that it’s most of us. You may be a sociopath or a misanthrope that enjoys EDM and in that case I would say this album is not for you, or at least its richness may remain out of grasp. But as Jeanette Wineterson said of Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (I’m sorry for the digression, but the quote is too appropriate) “It is like drinking a glass of wine with a pearl dissolving in the glass. You have taken in more than you know, and it will go on doing its work. From now on, a part of you is pearl-lined.”

Two songs remain, ‘Violet’ and ‘Affection,’ but we’ve reached our natural conclusion, and both things are best enjoyed without too much analysis, lest you should foster distrust or become a scientist. And here is not the place for science. ⛰️

Everyday, an album by Tourist on Spotify