Far from the typical pop-rock-folk format cliché, Windy & Carl show that it is possible to speak densely and closely of couple relationships, of their encounters, and especially of their failure to meet, using a musical language radically different from the conventional one. And this is one of the great merits of the musical, but also sentimental duo Windy Weber and Carl Hultgren, with a long career behind them in the area of drone, ambient, and bucolic noise: extrapolating their problems in living together and their emotional conflicts into a gliding instrumental sound discourse that is hard to get into, apparently cold and distant.
“Songs for the Broken Hearted,” their previous album and, to date, the most solid reference in their career, was a complex but fascinating dissertation on love and the end of love in which both of them reflected on the two sides of a romantic relationship. Comfortable in that dynamic of going inside emotion, now they bring us “We Will Always Be,” which although it isn’t as explicit in its exposition of ideas and situations, insists on delving into the ups and downs of a conjugal relationship (their own?) with a clear, very frank view. In fact, the album is designed, structured, and developed in such a way that the listener can identify different levels of emotional tension according to the different phases that can be experienced in any couple living together.
It is no coincidence that “For Rosa” and “Remember,” the two opening pieces, take place on a sound plane of serenity and idealisation. It is the beginning, the feeling that everything is going to go well, boreal beauty, Windy’s voice taking centre stage to evoke the good times. But with “Spires” and “The Frost in Winter” there is an observable chilling of the climate, a feeling of conflict comes into play, which becomes sharper in “Looking Glass” and “Nature of Memory,” the two tensest, most chaotic passages in the album, the ones that in a sense symbolize collision, problematic situations. Having overcome this phase of crisis, “The Smell of Old Books,” with a very significant title, and “Fainting in the Presence of Lord” end this journey with the two most notable, descriptive moments of the entire album. The interpretation is free and personal, but in its comforting sadness, there seem to lie hidden keys of understanding, tacit agreements to understand and overcome adversity. It is a sad but optimistic ending—or who knows, maybe the opposite—but its abstract, silent, cryptic exposition of all that can be felt and experienced in the course of a long-time sentimental relationship is exemplary.
Remember
