With lilies in his hands, Alex Henry Foster gives us “Blue as the Rain”
One of Canada’s most prolific and novel post-rock artists has long since tilled the soil of existential dread, and his latest tracks are the lilies his emotional grounds bear in their poignant bloom. “Blue as the Rain” by Alex Henry Foster is one of the crowning jewels of his latest record, The Fragile Beauty (Of New Morning Hopes).
Opening with a spacious and gritty bass line, he ushers in the ghostly fog of a slow-burning heartache climbing to indescribable places of personal and existential reckoning. The piano work, a collection of vocals that harmonize in a way that seems almost exclusively possible through guttural prayer. Alex Henry Foster’s work exceeds the boxes of vocalist, instrumentalist, poet, and does what artists rarely do through his unabashed ability to channel what lives within him. The thunderous drums and ambient weeping instrumentals leave their mark as a deeply instinctual composition forever sealed to the poetics of his lyricism on “Blue as the Rain.”
Listen to “Blue as the Rain” by Alex Henry Foster
Incredibly massive without the distance of budging from behind that eerily gripping place that’s closer than your own jugular vein. Alex Henry Foster’s “Blue as the Rain” is a culmination of distinctive instrumentation arranged like a living body; this single further shows that his work cannot be contained solely in the conversation of genre or mind-bending soundscapes, but rather a sonic tapestry woven between the very air it rides on and the intangible elements of what we face as conscious and living beings. With touches and shimmers of elements you’d find in The Cure, Arcade Fire, Pianos Become the Teeth, Blue October, Daughter, Alex Henry Foster’s ability to carve an emotive and uncanny exertion of both the personal and the sobering experiences humanity.
There’s a kind of repetition that reads like a sacred mantra of longing for what lies in the beyond. “Blue as the Rain” is a beautifully eviscerating experience that seeps in gorgeously before catching you off guard with walls of heart-wrenching sound. By the time the story and sentiments behind the lyrics crash into place in your mind, the impact of poetic themes crashes down of potent themes of heavy decisions, severed relationships, and the waves of grief.
“I initially wrote fragments of what eventually became ‘Blue as the Rain’ sitting on the terrace of a riad guest house in Tangier, where I intuitively let my thoughts drift in a nostalgically charged state of heart as I struggled through a particularly difficult season o fmy life following my father’s passing, the fracture of several relationships, and the obviousness of the existential crossroads I was denying, trying to avoid having to pick a direction for whatever would be next for me…” – Alex Henry Foster via Instagram
Watch the lyric video for “Blue as the Rain”
Along with a personal story that tests your knees against the kind of gravity that’s bound to find us all in the end, his music video for “Blue as the Rain” starts with another powerful sentiment from Jean Genet that really snaps the entire sound into place:
“Beauty has no other origin than a wound, unique, different for each person, hidden or visible, that everyone keeps in himself, that he preserves and to which he withdraws when he wants to leave the world for a temporary but profound solitude.” – Jean Genet, L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, Derrière le Miroir, June 1957
There’s a funereal ambience that sounds like it was painted with sounds as textures and structural pieces that somehow still keep their spirit sharp and penetrating through the fabric of disillusionment and disconnect of grief. It’s like Alex Henry Foster loses himself in the magic without losing the wizard-like control of the sound sorcery that was “Blue as the Rain” and the album at large.
Listen to Alex Henry Foster’s latest record, The Fragile Beauty (Of New Morning Hopes)
Written by Samson Winsor
