Super review by Cal Gibson, of The Secret Soul Society.

Eight mood pieces, sketches, slithers of sound in which jazz and ambient soundscapes slouch sleepily around each other, waiting and watching. Softly, slowly, nuzzling up against the sofa while whispering words of regret: here is the sound of lives less well-lived, of disappointment mounting.

Late night scenarios are introduced almost unnoticed, the last bus home after another ill-starred evening of strained conviviality. Hotel lobbies populated by ageing lotharios and dead-eyed hustlers: the city’s detritus that swims in pools anointed by Bukowski and bad drugs.

Simon Herody‘s ear for detail is telling: Table For Two is a little vignette of workaday paranoia: the feeling that whatever you’re doing it’s always wrong, there is no true path to righteousness after all. So sit and still yourself, or walk in the forest and watch the birds flit between the trees: soon enough different birds will take flight and your world will have slipped its moorings entirely.

Dimmed Lights is shapeshifting, eloquence reconfigured as heartbreak, Herody teasing out small victories from the night’s hard bargaining. There’s skill unfolding here, a restrained musicality that alights on a theme and then swoops sway, daring you to run and catch up, or ease off and lose the scent.

There’s confidence here too, a glad dismissal of the gauche and the glitzy. Think Raymond Carver, perhaps: short stories of gummed-up lives, sentences spoken but never understood. Sleep Tuff slinks past the bedroom window, a sly smile playing on lips that ought to know better. It’s charismatic, elegant stuff: faint echoes of Japanese pop tinkle and tumble and endings are suspended and never resolved.

Not too far from the likes of Sven Wunder, then, or Eno with added chops: Herody’s found a mark and is sticking with it, guns not blazing, eyes averted. If you’ve ever crept past a sleeping lover or cried over someone not worth the tears then Hard Lounge may well appeal. Low-key and lovely, dim the lights and let it sail on silver girl.

Simon Herody’s Hard Lounge is out now on RWR Records.