Jefre Cantu-Ledesma

(This article's English version was produced with AI-assisted translation)

Five tracks: one monolith ("The Milky Sea") and three, perhaps four, that feel like fillers. Such is the impression left by "Gift Songs", the latest creation of the ambient priest and a central figure of the scene. With works like "Love Is a Stream", where drone and shoegaze merge, the American artist quickly established himself as a guiding star, building the ideal refuge for melancholic listeners and escapists in search of sonic stillness.
The formula is clear: channel the allure of nature and translate it into music, with notes turned into a gift (hence the album's title), an offering to the divine. In his role as Zen priest, he manages to give sound to the intentions of his quest. Intentions, because part of the journey is left to improvisation and to the trust placed in the musicians who, together with him, weave the fabric of these compositions.

What, then, unsettles the flow? As mentioned, the cornerstone is "The Milky Sea", the opening track. Like a stream, it unfolds with ease through field recordings, piano arpeggios, muffled guitars, and whispered percussion: a sonic poetry, with a distinct new age kinship, almost impossible to resist. Yet the four movements that follow, at times, feel as though they are there more to stretch the running time than to serve a real expressive urgency.
Nothing that spoils the listening, on the contrary, but the three "Gift Songs" play like delicate sketches, unfinished works that only hint at piano chords: effective as interludes, less so when taken as the structural core of an album.

It is telling that these very pieces give the record its title, while the closing "River That Flows Two Ways" delivers nine minutes of organ drone (who said Pauline Oliveros?), once again capable of fascination, though steeped in monotony. What lingers is the aftertaste of something that might have grown into greatness, and the sense of a pleasant yet unremarkable parenthesis within a career that has already touched far more intense peaks.

18/09/2025