Ben Lovell is back. The Lily Tapes and Discs dude and Lung Cycles
ringleader has dropped the “collective’s” first new full-length in five years,
which will be six years when you read this (god, I get review submissions SO
LATE sometimes!). This is the third time I’ve reviewed his Lung Cycles project.
I have dug his work. That is no exception here.
In fact, this self-titled tape is a masterwork of delicate playing and
considerate slowcore, a 1990s Midwest treat filtered through present-day
Rochester New York. Together with a group of likeminded collaborators, Lovell
carefully lays out his songs like a collection of old maps, smoothing them out
and imagining what all those different roads would look like if you drove
through them in autumn. His acoustic guitar and hushed voice are the main
ingredients, but they’re accompanied with all sorts of gentle accoutrements. If
folk music ever teetered on the edge of ambient, it would be a Lung Cycles
release.
There’s so much beauty in it, so much heartache, that you can almost
hear the dried leaves crunch underfoot or the breeze in the rafters foretelling
winter. Pages of old hardback books turn slowly as their stories are
internalized, the smell of old paper and dust lingering in the air until the
books are returned to the shelf to wait for the next person to read them. If
anyone ever does. Maybe that particular copy will never be played again.
Maybe Lung Cycles sits on the shelf for my descendants? I hope it
gets more airtime than that. It certainly should.
--Ryan
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