An elegant seizure of beauty and mysterious rapture of living in and out of love, Ry X’s third LP, 'Blood Moon'Ry is a graceful descent into the waking caverns of our hearts. The Australian born singer took to isolation in the forested Topanga Mountains, finding solitude to carry the yearning themes of his subconscious into a body of work that encapsulates more than a mere love song.
What possesses us in love is unnamed, what we draw near to and how we unravel is a synthesis of more than just longing. It is a testament to everything we’ve ever been, ever felt, ever known. What we carry in love is a myriad of mirrors pointing us home. In a shaky sovereignty and a rawness that pulsates past the point of believing, X’s vocals transcend to a breaking cursor of prayer, a gentle ease of helpless desire. We are there in his paralysis of uncovering what we long for when we don’t yet know the ways in which our heart is speaking to us.
Starting off subtle, gentle, with a cadence of surrender, 'Let You Go' is an easeful heartbreak that holds us all the way through. With a melodic droning beat that pulsates past the echoed reverb of X’s voice into this celestial vortex of feeling the way we dissolve into and out of love.
“Does anybody really know
Where they go when they die?
You're the one I want this close
You're the one I can't deny”
It’s equal parts brave and tender, an ode to the ways in which we do not ever know, but somehow in that unknowingness we champion a space of belief in the ways we are love. Atmospheric reverb is slated against guitar interludes that dive further into the quest of the self. Sonically, this track, and entire album for that matter, does a brilliant job of placing us in the undoing. We are put in the cacophony of X’s philosophizing, it is both sobering and unifying. In this way we are met with the very human need and desire to love and be loved.
'Your Love' takes us down to a point of majesty in a soulful expansive ballad that mirrors the dissolving battle between love and time. A marriage of hope and tragedy in the poignancy of the lyrics dares to accept the way love’s edges brutally lay us down and a part.
The overarching composition of the album speaks to a greater attunement of feeling with Ry X’s isolation that offers shelter in a magnificent way. 'Come Back' opens brilliantly with airy horns oscillating to meet rich deeply embodied piano chords that lift us and hold us in the quake of everything our hearts do and do not know. This track builds in a way that echoes the renewal of love, minimal echoed synthesized notes drone together to offer a kind of peace for the tender hearted.
'Blood Moon' is a brutally beautiful examination of how love shapes and seizes everything we are. Ry X’s music is that of ritual, of prayer, a way to set down, to examine, to release, to renew. His songs are a home to hold the pieces of grief, a way to breathe and rectify the delicate nature of love. By the end of this album, we’ve sat in a discourse that, in its entirety, is a beautiful rapture of what it is to be, and to be together. At the end of this album, we remember, once again, how we are the way love is.
8/10
Words: Rae Niwa
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