Strange name choice aside (Bombazine Black was on my list of proposed hardcore band names when I was 13, just under Felonious Punk), the new project from Matt Davis of Gersey is an unwieldy beast to wrestle with.

Judged as an album (yes, that argument again), it’s surely a failure. A collection of primarily instrumental tracks composed by Davis in Paris during an artistic residency, these are a series of pretty, yet ultimately insubstantial moments.

Melodically, Davis’ compositions rarely deviate from a pre-ordained path; one that often echoes the early highpoints of Gersey’s back catalogue including the Bewilderment is a Blessing EP and the Hope Springs LP. The songs are sparsely backed with instrumentation that rarely challenges the progressions, preferring the hollow emotional consolations of ringing, solid accompaniment whether cello, piano or delayed guitar.

It’s almost as though, in deliberately avoiding the crescendos employed by most late ’90s post-rock/instrumental acts, Davis has castrated his ideas, leaving them in the first blush of youth, never letting them struggle into pubescence and maturity. Too often the songs sound still-born, stuck in a half-life. Bereft of Gersey counterpart Craig Jackson’s rich vocals they fail to ascend.

Occasionally, Davis will inject other material to layer the songs – sounds of Parisian streetscapes feature intermittently – but even these samples rarely confront the musical terrain he traverses. More damning is the fact that these moments conjure no special sense of location. Davis’ milieu of urban ennui sounds the same whether he’s playing guitar on a Gersey song about crossing Scotchmer and Queen streets, or composing music in Paris.

It’s unsurprising that the bio material makes much of the fact that Bombazine Black has been selected by director Sarah Watt (Look Both Ways) as incidental film music. (Davis has also been asked to write the score to the directorial debut by Candy author Luke Davies’). The album feels like incidental film music to me, attached to some narrative context we, the listeners, can never access.

There’s some great ideas and some extremely affecting material here (‘April 29’ and ‘The Sun Will Set’ are particularly notable), it just operates at a slight remove; an emotional distance not assisted by the melodic stasis Davis’ favours. Maybe the trick is in the names again? Too often “their” dreams rarely cross paths with the fitful rememberings that colour ours.

by JP Hammond