The Vernon Spring Finds Clarity in Haze

Sam Beste has played with Amy Winehouse, Beth Orton, and MF Doom, but as the Vernon Spring, the British pianist-composer-producer takes a more experimental route. 

On his second album, Under a Familiar Sun, Beste layers, loops, and strings together field recordings, vocal samples, spoken word, and spare piano melodies, forming an allusive/elusive collage. Beste keeps things short—the album’s 12 tracks average about three minutes in length, but the collision of widely different elements can often make each piece seem like several songs superimposed over each other. The rampant multiplicity never feels schizophrenic or jarring—the tracks often run together or float into each other, with sparse motifs recurring throughout. While the constant shifts can make this music hard to pin down, it carries an emotive warmth that keeps its mysteries approachable. 

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A few songs stick out from the fluid haze, such as “The Breadline,” featuring a mellow monologue by poet Max Porter and a strong undercurrent of political discontent, or the intricate “Esrever Ni Rehtaf.” By far the longest song on the album at seven minutes, “Esrever” weaves together rustling subterranean electronics, drifty vocals (from singer-astrophysicist aden), and blurred-raindrop piano notes, cohering into a kind of amniotic ambience. And though Beste is working in a more open-ended mode, hints of his pop past do surface. “Other Tongues” begins with a fluttery electronic barrage but soon morphs into a hesitant ballad with (possibly sampled) female vocals, while the title track strikes a careful balance between soul-tinged piano hooks and lithe cascades of abstraction and furry crackle. By threading gentle drones and snippets of percussion through new jack swing piano and intermittent vocals from Iko Niche, “Mustafa” somehow manages to conjure the ghost of Motown, faint and attenuated but still weirdly powerful.

Beste often appears to be rifling through a series of ideas, as on opening song “Norton,” which toggles between hip-hop-adjacent beats and an array of vocal samples from what sound like remnants of R&B hits from older days. The elegiac simplicity of “Requiem for Reem,” on the other hand, delivers a straightforward shot of emotion with only Beste’s murmuring piano melody resting on a pillow of reverb and cottony feedback. There’s a scrapbook element to these songs, as if Beste is shuffling through memories and then arranging them into some private order. Sometimes he lingers and focuses, and that’s when recognizable shapes and feelings emerge. But such clarity is brief and soon dissolves into the organic flow. On Under a Familiar Sun, Sam Beste has taken ghostly ambiguity and made it sound like the most natural thing in the world. 

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