Shai Erlichman: AEM102 Shai Erlichman
Album Description
“Mornings When” finds him sitting at his kitchen table watching the morning sunlight pour in through the window, having a simple breakfast, and it manages to express the wonderful pleasure of simple things like eating alone in sunny kitchens (encapsulated in the beautiful line I will sit and feel what belongs), a pleasure that is inseparable from its own transience (the line I will sit and feel what is gone). It’s a small moment that’s enormous in feeling.
B-side “The Season” adds to the hazy guitars and sparse drums a pleasant rhythmic tension between 6/8 and 4/4 (notice that the drum part often gently fights against the triplets in the guitar by playing what sounds like a straight backbeat) and a darker tone. Somehow, against the minor key arpeggios of Erlichman’s guitar, the lines everyone, everyone is happy / and everyone, everyone is needed sound ironic (in the traditional sense of the word, not the trucker hat sense), and something about the way the lyrical sentences never seem to end, running on and on and then trailing off mid clause at the end of both the first chorus and second verse, gives the song an ominous feeling like a day where the heat coming off the sidewalk is so intense it distorts the air.
AEM102 Shai Erlichman by Shai Erlichman is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.