Merz - A Fallen Angel in Bristol

Conrad Lambert, aka Merz, is the most introverted pop craftsman you're likely to come across around Clifton Bridge. His songwriting is a meticulous collage of folktronic fragments, speckled with a velvety, penetrating voice. A poignant image of the irreversibility of things, of dishevelled, wilted beauty

by Fabio Russo, Giuliano Delli Paoli

Bristol's singer-songwriter scene has always been one of the most valuable repositories of intimate Anglo-Saxon indie-pop. The evergreen art of (melo)dramatic post-rock perpetually hovers over the south-west of the UK, almost as if marking a natural emotional counterpoint to the grey urban fabric of this small metropolis.

From here, singers of immaculate flair emerge with striking regularity: solitary souls who drown their moods and ill humours in the writing of a lyric, in the shaping of a melody, conceived to both soothe and torment that recurring lament of the self.

Conrad Lambert, aka Merz, is the most introverted pop craftsman you're likely to come across around Clifton Bridge.

A melancholy, reflective songwriter, his art is a meticulous collage of acoustic fragments shaped by the exotic chime of a xylophone, the muffled thud of a barely sketched beat, the pristine flow of a distant piano.

An accomplished multi-instrumentalist for around a decade now, Lambert lights up our fragile little niches with a brand of britpop craftsmanship submerged beneath pebbles of soft indietronica, finished with melodic inlays that never overstay their welcome, wrapped in a voice that's intense, penetrating, gentle - the kind that stirs the soul with every slow sigh.

Merz's compositional creativity springs from the depths of a barely concealed restlessness; his is a grey-tinted gaze, one that holds inner fragilities filtered with grace into notes that are, at the very least, heart-wrenching. A reclusive artist, capable of staying away from the indie underground (and from plausible stardom) for years on end, rather than give in to the hollow lure of music that doesn't feel truly earned.

In the autumn of 1999 came the first work by this evocative songwriter, simply titled Merz (Gronland, 1999).

Although Conrad Lambert can count on some influential connections (he's produced for Epic, performed live alongside Coldplay), he shows little interest in pursuing a full-blown britpop path, revealing instead a refined, speckled folktronic potential - a singular and distinctive hybrid.

A miscellaneous dedication to his own musical obsessions and his own restless poetic ghosts.

Lambert's enchanting voice wraps every word in an ineffable flow; it's a magical timbre you could imagine singing anything, adorning it without ever embarrassing it, buoyed by its own dense weightlessness.

It's also this peculiar combination - sturdy of build yet fragile of spirit - that keeps the work vital and current, where other releases from the same era have irredeemably withered, or still reek, today as much as yesterday, of indie-kid posturing from a mile off.

In the case of Merz, the chrysalis is already a butterfly, rising vivid and vital in its irregular flight against the storm, almost dominating the bleak scene depicted on its striking cover. That image is a perfect symbiosis with the album's music: Merz is an imaginative, singular and tenacious debut, one to be rediscovered and not judged merely for what it would go on to inspire.

Conrad Lambert proves capable of tinting multiple genres, making them shine by binding them to his spiritual blues; flaunting a polished appeal, measured with skill, amid musical arrangements and fervent lyrics.

“Many Weathers Apart” opens and courses through the record, neurotic and restless, over electric vertebrae reminiscent of Massive Attack; unfurling a superb, tough-as-leather vocal performance. “Engine Heart” keeps up the flirtation, between a bed of keyboards and an imaginative acoustic fingerpicking, ante “Neo-Acoustic Movement”, before turning to enchant and then torment itself, in a chorus swollen with regret.

On the gently curved, sentimental fabric of “Forsake”, unexpected echoes of an illustrious west-coast singer-songwriter surface. Amid unpredictable instrumental passages (sax, acoustic guitar) and a velvety voice, Lambert has evidently absorbed that lesson too, with remarkable maturity.

The flirtatious breezes of “Lovely Daughter”, the syncopations of “CC Conscious”, or the example of serene techno found in “Asleep” and “Blues Became” alternate with the sustained beat of small, rarefied personal dramas worn with great ease, like “Starlight Night”, with its evocative draping of strings.

A star is born.

Six years of absolute silence have drawn our rising star away from the celestial firmament of British indie-pop. Only in 2005 does Lambert switch the studio lights back on, baking up his masterpiece.

The forty minutes of Loveheart (Gronland, 2005) gracefully contain one of the most cultured and colourful examples of properly British indietronic melodrama.

The opening “Postcard From A Dark Star” is a treasure chest of ecstatic folktronica, reined in with class by the immaculate swell of a piano that weeps, vibrates, breathes, until it dissolves into a sudden gust of wind.

In “Verily” the melancholy grows beyond measure, reaching the bottom of the ravine, the awareness of lost love weaving vocal and folkloric threads bristling with post-relationship anguish. It is instead the faint strength of a flame about to go out that drives the acoustic phrasing of “My Name Is Sad And At Sea”.

Lambert is a candle bidding farewell to its own wax forever. A dark, touching account, aimed at tearing apart the torments crowding his fragile emotional microcosm.

Loveheart is a constant hypnosis, crafted by its enchanter with at times disarming care. The lyric writing is spared out with restraint, the poet even tosses his pocket watch into the basket of crumpled notes.

At the heart of the record, the lofty murmur of some sirens heralds the arrival of a rediscovered restlessness: “Butterfly” shows the wings of Merz the dreamer, of an optimistic and confident Lambert, of a happy, smiling Conrad. It's all a funfair of melodic watercolours, playful chirping and vibrant electronic flutters.

The parade of intentions is disorienting in its meticulous execution. The intricate stylistic branches trace out delicate shades, timid bongos propping up the overlapping of electric whirlwinds, a piano imploding in the voltaic flow of a barely hinted-at explosion (“Mistic Transformation”).

Lambert flaunts all his flair with the confidence of a shepherd in full control of his flock.

With Loverheart, the star Merz radiates all its energy.

Three years of perfect anonymity, marked by constant moves to the quietest of counties, and our troubadour is among us once again.

Moi Et Mon Camion (Gronland, 2008) rises on an incipit of light fingerpicking, conjuring up a hermitage of Simon Jeffes's Penguin Cafe Orchestra. It frames and suddenly stages an acute sense of regret, a folk-tinged leitmotif that is nothing less than a sorrowful, ravishing angelic longing.

It's the small, traumatic, new passionate spell woven by Conrad Lambert on the title track of Merz's third album, which lays out a virtual road without banks or limits. This soothing astral matter will often return along the way to enrapture and astonish, quite literally (“Silver Moon Ladders,” one of the finest songs of 2008, “Cover Me,” “The First And Last Waltz”), rising heavenward here and there on a whim, illuminating a work whose consistent mastery sits and measures itself in a supernatural balance of ingredients.

A genuine and unusual talent for measuring out and commanding his own emotional flow — candid, delicate and pregnant — without letting it tyrannize and drown everything, as happens with so many artists, in a feeble, empty, narcissistic stream of lament that snuffs out lucid, costly rationality and the human proportions of the discourse.

Lambert heightens shapes and blurs outlines, in a meticulous, sophisticated nursery of fine details, only to set off again, inconsolable and solitary, without ever putting down roots; crossing and traversing the atmosphere in his vehicle armored with bitter icing and sauce, the residue of tears. All the tougher and more unassailable in itself, the more fearlessly and panic-free it presses onward.

One can allow a couple of “off-route” antidepressant detours without ever watering things down (“Shun,” “Lucky Man”), which are in any case instantly cauterized as soon as the material plunges back into that boundless, maternal nocturnal soul, drawing in mirages blown on the wind, the core and crux of the discourse.

A poignant image of the irreversibility of things, of a disheveled, faded beauty; of awareness and subtle disillusionment that alerts and wounds. One hears echoes of the Drake-like breath, and of Mark Oliver Everett and Fred Cornog: not by chance, other “souls without footprints”…