Gentle Sinners – These Actions Cannot Be Undone
The Twilight Sad's James Graham and Arab Strap's Aidan Moffat throw out their own rulebooks on this thrilling collaborative LP as Gentle Sinners
When James Graham first announced this new collaborative side project last November, with the release of first single Killing This Time, he’d only reveal that it comprised himself and “someone else”. There was no keeping his own identity under wraps – regardless of the musical backdrop, The Twilight Sad frontman’s thick brogue is unmistakable – but those looking for clues as to who he’d been working with this time might have found clues in Killing This Time’s dramatic bursts of strings and off-kilter groove.
It’s the sort of thing we’ve heard flashes of before from Aidan Moffat, both in his solo work and with Arab Strap, but the opportunity to write music for somebody else’s voice seems to have cracked open a whole new world for him. These Actions Cannot Be Undone unfolds in impressionistic fashion, Moffat’s instrumentals often coming over more like sound collages, especially on stylistically mercurial tracks like Rent Free, on which the jazz influence is unmistakable, and Don’t Say Goodnight, which is somehow both chaotic and spaced-out at the same time.
For his part, Graham matches Moffat’s adventurousness, suddenly breaking off towards the end of the brooding, industrial-inflected Let Them Rot to include a recording of his kid, cheekily credited as featured artist AKG, singing the words back to him, while on the minimalist Date & Sign he comes somewhere close to falsetto, with a broader vocal range across the album than we've ever heard from him; lyrically, meanwhile, themes of love, loss and hope pervade, as does a fascination with medication, self-administered and otherwise. It’s entirely possible that Gentle Sinners may prove too off-the-wall for fans of the Sad – only opener Waiting for Nothing and closer Landfill are musically comparable – but for those willing to make the same leap of faith that Graham and Moffat did in choosing to veer away from their bread and butter, These Actions Cannot Be Undone is a consistently thrilling listen.
Listen to: Let Them Rot, Date & Sign, Don’t Say Goodnight