Colouring’s new album has a sincerity and heartfelt warmth that transcends grieving.
It’s just the way we’re wired, but sometimes you can grow more by going through the hard stuff and coming out of the other side in one piece, mentally and physically.
In this process the brain has a way of making things feel they were better than they were over time, and letting go of it all with hindsight can be a real lesson in catharsis.
For Nottingham-based singer Jack Kenworthy, those worst of times came when his to-be brother-in-law was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2021.
‘I’ve always been on the side of making up scenarios rather than being really honest about my life within my music,’ Kenworthy has said of his process up to that point. ‘This is the first time I’ve been able to do that. I’ve been less scared of it because it’s not my story. It’s a shared one.’
Colouring‘s Love To You, Mate as a result is part eulogy, part journal and part playlist for a wake, all threaded into a bricolage which is as fragile often as the emotions experienced during that twelve-month odyssey.
Even without knowledge of the back story, it’s still a profoundly uplifting record, made with a sincerity and heartfelt warmth that transcends grieving.
Colouring was once a band project, but when that arrangement came to a natural conclusion five years ago the singer’s long-time collaborator Gianluca Buccellati baulked at the idea of collapsing it entirely.
As a solo artist, Colouring’s debut Wake arrived in 2021, but its follow-up is more sonically ambitious, undersold and minimalist, but texturally layered and strong though delicate syntheses.
This means a basic palette of piano, bass and drums augmented by synth washes and programming that lends tracks like I Don’t Want to See You Like That, with its skittering beats and bled out pads, a spectral backwash.
Fragments also surface of the new language the family began to learn as fate began to squeeze reality: How’d It Get So Real? is a phrase that was in circulation which simply dropped into the piece as it was being written, a spontaneous narrative that ended up being immortalised.
Kenworthy has revealed that his inspirations amongst others have long been The Blue Nile and Elbow, both lofty perches to seek out.
The former though are refracted through This Light’s elegiac beauty whilst For Life, with its celebration of friendship and the ties that bind, finds Colouring in warmly authentic Guy Garvey-esque mode.
With more than a little poignancy, it ends with a recording of a drunken family get together where a shared, ghostly rendition of Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues is carried by a willing ensemble.
The most admirable quality here though is in writing songs which function equally well as pop avatars whilst staying within the fragmented conceptual field of view, with the soaring, sweetly insistent Lune for example working in whatever setting the listener would care to put it.
Chief of these triumphs however is Coda, a steepling ballad delivered partially in high falsetto dedicated to Colouring’s wife, yet an affirmation, ‘I’ve got you’, that together the rawness and hurt will at some dateless point over the horizon begin to fade.
It’s as old as, us forgetting what made everything seem so bad, a numbness that can never replace what we had before the goodness can come back.
Love To You, Mate finds Colouring using the memories themselves as part of the recovery, a record which is proof that you can still dance in your own time, place and memory.
