Arran George - Man in the Moon

With simple instrumentation – a reverberating, uncluttered guitar pattern – and a minimal rhythmic scaffold –  a muted strum on 3 – Arran George is not trying to hide behind effects here. This track is an exercise in control and sparsity, but not for sparsity’s sake; at one point he even briefly backs up his vocals with sweet layered vocals, a frictionless unearthly choir – blink and you’ll miss it.

I bet Arran George is tired of being compared to Bon Iver. Here we go again. The airy vocals sit in a similar range, and the melody feels decidedly Iver-eque. His lyrics feel somehow grandiose and relatable, like a melancholic giant is crying; like an angel has fallen and is trying to win our sympathy. That is perhaps what makes this song so compelling to me: the sense of a larger purpose bursting out of the sparse framework of a track that can hardly contain sustain the pressure.