Eerie, spectral lullabies of a warped, distrusting heart with songs inspired by everything from weird car crashes involving fleeing villains to the peevish manipulation of someone else’s emotions and senses. And with guest contributions from Coldplay’s Chris Martin, the Flaming Lips Wayne Coyne and REM’s Michael Stipe words like ‘fragile’, ‘surreal’ and ‘tender’ are not going to be far away either. And that’s what you have here.
‘Your Love Means Everything’ is the second album from Faultine writer, producer, arranger, player, manager David Kosten, this time re-drawn and reissued with three faultless new tracks and a couple of old ones (‘Bitter Kiss’ and ‘Missing’) withdrawn. Not that you’d notice, for as lavished with praised as the album was the first time around (the NME, the Sunday Times loved it) it failed to register with the buying public. But with new single ‘White Horses’ poised to run amok upon the airwaves, things could soon be turned around.
‘Snapshots of my imaginary life, start to finish’ is the way Kosten chooses to describe the album and with it’s loose, fragmentary and often arbitary musical threads coursing like mercury through tracks as delicate and as cataleptic as ‘Your Love Means Everything’ and ‘Theme For Half Speed’ it’s as convincing enough an assessment as any: extraneous, peripheral whirring noises, blurring atmospherics, magic orchestral passages, and muffled, half-life organs. Too prettily and mindfully conceived to be dismissed as ‘ambient’, too listless and unpredictable to be classed as ‘downtempo’.
But as charming as the album’s many instrumental passages are it’s the contributions made from its wealth of guest vocalists that provide the class: the clanking alien cyberspaces of ‘We Come From Lego Blocks’ featuring Vordul Megilah from East Coast hip hop duo Cannibal Ox and Ras B’s ‘Biting Tongues’, the chiming oriental madrical that is Wayne Coyne’s ‘The Colossal Grey Sunshine’ and the pulsing vibrato of Chris Martin’s beautiful ‘Your Love Means Everything Part 2’.
Real World artist and Peter Gabriel protégé Joseph Arthur provides a truly staggering cover of the Rolling Stone’s ‘White Horses’ to comprise one of three actual standalone tracks that are completed by Michel Stipe’s retro and broadly cinematic epic ‘Greenfields’ and Chris Martin’s groping and womblike ‘Where Is My Boy?’.
If, as Kosten suggests, the first incarnation of this album was ‘ripped out of the studio at the wrong moment’ then its quite fair to say it’s been afforded the perfect rights of passage here. And who better to midwife it than yourself? Go out and buy it today…