THE BONY KING OF NOWHERE - Silent Days

How do you stitch the threads of your life back together after a failed marriage, while also breaking free from a deep creative impasse serious enough to make you rethink your entire creative process? For Bram Vanparys the answer was fairly simple, if anything but easy: he bought a caravan, moved out to the Ardennes, and the Belgian singer-songwriter found a way to piece his life back together and, above all, to take his art in a drastically new direction. Having set aside the bare-bones folk-pop essentiality of his early work - which nonetheless carried a sweetness and romanticism more unique than rare these days - with "Silent Days" the musician completely changes approach and lands in a thoroughly rock-leaning dimension, dominated by elaborate arrangements and layered compositions, without ever sacrificing the pronounced intimacy of his pen. Bending his ambitions to a style of writing that preserves all its emotional candor, with his fifth album the artist nails his personal classic, a collection that bridges past and future in an exemplary expressive embrace. There's no going back from here.

There's a strong aura of classicism running through the grooves of these silent days, a classicism that has always permeated the work of the Bony King of Nowhere, but which here returns with triple the energy, further highlighting the lineage that runs from Townes Van Zandt and Leonard Cohen through the decades down to the most sensitive contemporary songwriters. While it's true that Vanparys's art genuinely carries a timeless aura that allows it to transcend any precise temporal placement (the subject matter of the lyrics helps a great deal in this regard!), his sensibility nonetheless keeps him from simply imitating the lessons of the past wholesale, carving out a well-defined stylistic niche that has no shortage of ties to the present.

Dressing his compositions in synth textures and explicit drone-like touches (clearly audible in several instrumental codas), the singer-songwriter ventures into territory akin to Adam Granduciel or the more psychedelic side of Kurt Vile, which in turn also reshapes the very structure of the songs. The use of more expansive tempos and progressions with an almost prog flavor (bordering on baroque at times) works entirely in favor of the markedly emotional nature of both Vanparys's writing and his intense vocal delivery, which captures every nuance through shifts in tone and passionate interpretation. And it does so without a shred of superfluous drama or contrived emotion undermining an alchemy painstakingly built, the creative reflection of a soul not yet fully healed, one that can't help but keep licking its own wounds.

At the first real turning point of a still-young career, the most sentimental of currently living kings reaches his first great milestone, a dense and necessary meditation on pain and his own existence, captured through a stylistic prism that has precious little that's silent about it. Personal tragedy, said without a trace of cynicism, once again serves as the launchpad for his artistic testament.

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12/01/2019