Saudade is a Portuguese word for a feeling of nostalgic longing towards something or someone that one was fond of and which is lost. It often carries a pessimistic tone and inherent knowledge that the object of longing will never return. The word is heavily burdened by the weight of unrealized potentiality, of unrelenting sadness for the ghosts of the past that we ache for, yet we know better than to live in hope for their return. Though it may be running through the same vein as the more familiar word nostalgia, to say that they carry the same emotional connotations is a gross understatement. When I read July Skies' (Antony Harding) impetus for the project's fourth album, The Weather Clock, I couldn't think of a more applicable word than saudade.
The corpus of Harding's work has revolved around the British post-war experience during the mid-twentieth century and the non-descript, promising decades thereafter. His second album (released with Ben Holton and Rob Glover of Epic45) was recorded at Wheaton Aston, Staffordshire in the proximity of an abandoned 1940's airbase and dually drew inspiration and paid homage to the "lost airmen" of World War II. The third album, Where the Days Go, offered up a collection of tracks left over from the first EP, At the Height of Summer, a handful of new songs, and two Epic45 reworkings. Continuing on this trend, The Weather Clock takes its cue from the central focus of post-war Britain and the peripheral developments in architecture that had a profound impact on the suburban British milieu.
The emergence of cookie-cutter municipal housing estates offered the war-bruised country an optimistic change of direction, a new shining future that unfortunately never came to fruition. This is a past that pre-dates most of us, a pristine, frivolous past that we can only wish we had experienced. I'm sure even those of us hailing from the US can draw parallels to this environment in America during the same period. The years before were whittled away by anxiety and longing for loved ones called to arms. Alternatively, in the post-war decades people could rest and rebuild, filled with the promise of tomorrow. Hazy afternoons could be spent lounging in recumbence, striated by the light and warmth of the sun through gently rippling net curtains.
The Weather Clock offers a gentle flowing compendium of fragile, autumnal guitar work and samples of a speaking clock bleating out the time through a smiling mouth. The vocals on the albums are sparse but well placed and color the tracks as beautifully as do the shoegazey guitars. Each title is methodically evocative -- vague enough to allow the listener to form their own opinion but suggestive enough to thread lines of Harding's initial theme. July Skies has received criticism for its blurry song distinction and deliberate climactic elisions; those who have turned on this record anticipating dynamic, ascending guitar work will be disappointed. For those who have grown to love the sound the July Skies has established on the previous albums, a sound that shies from ostentation and embraces subtleties applied by Harding's minimal instrumentation, The Weather Clock will not disappoint you.
As I am in this latter camp, this album has endeared itself to me as the weather steadily warmed from spring to summer. I was disheartened by Harding's statement that this album would be the last of his macro-landscape sound trilogy, the "last 39 minutes of chiming guitars, echoing pianos and dreams of when suburbia first met the countryside." Promises of a darker, electronic sound based on the musician‘s personal kernels of nostalgia from the artist's own memories are said to make up July Skies new sound. We'll see, perhaps this sound will sate the stern critics. In the meantime I'm going to enjoy this album for everything that it is and I encourage you to do the same: Sit back, soak it in, and. with aching thoughts of the past planted deeply in your conscious, try to experience your present in the elated, worryless way that Harding so beautifully intones.
-P.J. Stevenson