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HIGH
(Sanctuary)
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The Blue Nile move slowly — four albums spread out over more than two decades is not prodigious. Their music moves slowly too, creating sustained moods in much the way Stanley Kubrick’s camera loiters endlessly on an image, forcing you to look deeper. But if all that matters to you is quality, then who cares about time? On 1996’s Peace at Last, this Scottish trio’s previous CD, principal songwriter Paul Buchanan appeared to have found a degree of domestic bliss. Unfortunately, his gain marked a loss for the band’s material in terms of emotional resonance. High finds him on less stable ground — over the past several years he’s been fighting an incapacitating undisclosed illness. But what’s been bad for his body and soul has been good for his writing. His songs concern themselves with fidelity, existential confusion, loneliness, rooftops, morning sun, and traffic noise. Delivered in his lugubrious Scott Walkerish voice, these depictions of life’s little truths take on weight. "Because of Toledo" and "She Saw the World" ooze with quiet desperation. "An ordinary miracle is what we need," he sings on "The Days of Our Lives." There’s a sense in which High is just that.
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