DAVID ALLRED - The Beautiful World

David Allred's new album is without doubt the most difficult and painstaking of the Californian musician's long career. An author who moved from his tentative early forays into singer-songwriting, mostly acoustic-folk, toward a chamber folk increasingly close to ambient and neoclassical sonorities.

With “The Beautiful World”, the American artist confronts the grief over the suicide of a dear friend, Lauren, and so it is only natural that suffering and loss are the dominant emotional threads of a record where the most visceral feelings are often kept in check. Despite the mastery of various styles the author previously flaunted, these eleven compositions play it frugal. Minimalism is not so much the sonic archetype Allred has chosen for this project (though Steve Reich is always lurking in the wings), as an obscure and undefined blend of deliberately unconnected emotional states, as if the musician wanted to find a point of contact between life and death, hope and oblivion.

As the sonic body becomes more tangible and harmonically defined ("Introverts As Leaders"), tension slowly builds ("Good Afternoon"), only to erupt in the placid arms of the album's only definite and more conventional composition ("Oh Lauren"). The track becomes an almost cathartic moment: David Allred doesn't dwell on suffering, searching instead through the details for seeds of a rebirth of imagination and desire. Entrusting the final moments of uncertainty to the evocative "The Door", he revives his passion for folk in "Look" before projecting himself toward the future with the lengthy space-psych-folk excursion of "Elevation 145", built on drone-music, closing the circle of an intense and courageous album.

A far more intimate and introverted album, "The Beautiful World" is not an easy record to approach, nor is it one of the most engaging releases by the American musician. David Allred has deliberately kept a low profile, as confirmed by the decision to press only 300 copies, as if to underline the intimate value of such deep and personal feelings.

I doubt this work will earn a place in the year-end lists, but those who take the pleasure of encountering its placid beauty will hardly set it aside after a few listens.

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14/02/2025