TUNES // Vagabon – In A Bind

Post by Misha

This song feels like settling in. Soft, skeletal guitar in the opening bars suggests a wish for temporariness, or the hope that it might be possible to step gingerly and quickly from stone to stone to the other side of a deep sorrow without falling in. (Of course, it is not; the synths kick in, and we fall.) But falling in is warmer and more generous than expected. Instead of an abyss there is a pool, warm and flat, with steam rising into the half light.

This is what I mean by settling in: that the song knows exactly where it is and is not afraid to stay for as long as it takes. It makes a home within a kind of endless and fluid pain, and finds the small comforts that exist there. There is honeyed darkness, a perfect aloneness, and the way that certain sounds generate heat in total solitude.

Buy Vagabon’s breathtaking self-titled album here, out now on Nonesuch Records.