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Close to Paradise

by

Patrick Watson

 
Close to Paradise
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Avg: 4.0 (185 ratings)

The rock & roll dream made flesh?

  • We Say...

    Review by Paul Moody

    Sensitive Californian Watson hitches ride to vogue-ish Montreal scene, wows local luminaries with jaw-dropping performances and — presto — there’s another celestial star in the galaxy of alterna-rock. Is this the rock & roll dream made flesh or more proof that, a decade on from his tragic dip in the Mississippi, the loss of Jeff Buckley is still felt as keenly as ever?

    Patrick Watson may be a piano man at heart (confusingly, he fronts a four-piece band that shares his name) but his songs positively shiver with longing and lust. Don’t let the tinkling Bavarian waltz "Weight of the World" fool you into thinking he’s only here to work shifts at the Cabaret Café when Rufus Wainwright goes missing; once the woozy, Sgt. Pepper-era harmonies of “Man under the Sea” haul you in, there’s no alternative other than to be sucked into the vortex of Watson’s musical whirlpool. Deep breath then.

    Unlike so many singer-songwriters who present themselves as plaid-clad Atlases, struggling with the weight of the world, with Watson that crushing feeling never arrives. Instead, by the time he croons “For a minute of the day/ You taste so sweet” during the shimmering baroque pop of “Luscious Life,” you realise Close to Paradise is the sort of album people will cherish in student dorms and hash-filled bedrooms long after this year’s other fast-fads have run their course. Admittedly, this artful mix of steel-pedal guitar, glitch-cognizant drums and vocal crescendos marks him out as flavour of the month, but Watson seems headed somewhere far more other-worldly.

    Fame and fortune may already loom on the horizon, but Watson — as he admits in "The Great Escape" — is more interested in charting a path toward unknown pleasures somewhere “far from all the things that we are.”

  • They Say...

    Review by Marisa Brown, All Music Guide

    Before starting his quartet, Patrick Watson explored a variety of musical forms, from rock to electronica, and though Close to Paradise is clean indie pop, these other influences show up in the album frequently. A Coldplay for the hipster crowd (that's X&Y-era Coldplay, not Parachutes Coldplay), Watson and his band write lush, ethereal, spacey melodies that swell into Jeff Buckley-esque symphonies or relax into measured shoegazer riffs; there are hints of ambient too, the way everything tends to swirl and coalesce, the occasional subtle drum programming, the stuttering loops, but there's also chamber pop in the string arrangements and piano arpeggios and even, at times, a tendency toward cabaret. But despite all these things happening, the album never comes across as busy or overwhelming. In part this is thanks to the Canadian folk influence -- the moan of the lap steel, the flitting banjo -- that sweeps over everything like a prairie wind, Neil Young allusions and all, grounding the pieces in simple chord changes or wisping lines, but it's also very much because of guitarist Simon Angell (from Watson's high school ska band Gangster Politics), who adds his lightly distorted electric guitar at just the right moments, just when the dreamy piano seems to be moving too far outward into unstructured territory. In "Drifters," for example, Watson's trippy vocals echo off one another, but before it becomes too dancey, Angell comes in with strong, classical chords, pulling the piece toward something lush and orchestrated like what the Dears, rather than BT, might do. With "Slip into Your Skin" he uses his instrument to different effect, waiting until the song is more than halfway done before he plays his slow but frantic-sounding riff; it's sparse but it's deliberate and necessary, short lines of dialogue that bring the plot together with the characters and the setting. In fact, Close to Paradise plays like a film soundtrack more than anything else, from the Cirque du Soleil vamping of "Weight of the World" to the Peter Pan-esque twinkling of "Daydreamer," backing the story of some sunken-shouldered traveler as he walks, or floats, across the plains. Entrancing, to say the least.

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