Will Samson – Hello Friends, Goodbye Friends

I’m a melancholy kind of guy. Sometimes I’ll sit, as the light fades – in a park, let’s say – and drink from an open can, and then another, as the clouds darken and the cars stream past and a man walks by with a mattress on his head, and I’ll remember friends, maybe dead, maybe just gone. Invariably, I will be listening to some music. This album is made for those times.

In my head, I used to present a radio show called ‘33 1/3 BPM’, which featured slow, sad love songs for the discerning 3AM listener, kind of like the aural equivalent to the sleeve of Frank Sinatra’s 1959 album No One Cares – you know the one, where he’s sitting at the bar, chin in hand, staring glumly into his whiskey, contemplating his lot. This would have fitted in perfectly.

You get the picture.

Hello Friends, Goodbye Friends, Will Samson’s latest album on the somewhat unfortunately titled Plop Records, is an overwhelmingly introspective record. Recorded during a period of self-imposed exile in Berlin on a simple 8-track machine, it focuses on the then 22-year-old’s isolation and the consequences thereof: his feelings of being lost, of leaving things behind, of not knowing what will come.

Sounds like a right barrel of laughs, yeah?

Well, let me tell you something else: Hello Friends, Goodbye Friends, is also unforgivingly quiet. And slow. I mean, really slow. Add to this lyrics such as, “And I would be lost without you, please don’t leave” (Panda Bear), and “It’s hard when you’re on your own” (Violins and Polaroids), sung in a Bon Iver-ish falsetto, and you could be easily forgiven for steering well clear.

But you’d be missing out. For Hello Friends, Goodbye Friends is, despite the odds, quite gorgeous.

OK, so it’s not the sort of thing you’d put on while getting ready for a night out looting and burning, but that’s what the Smiths are for, right? Yes, it’s naïve and awkward – and if you listened to it with your hard mates, you’d probably get bashed – but so what? In this world where everyone craves the same fake plastic dreams, it’s refreshing to hear something so honest, something that is personal, something that, you know, actually means something.

At its simplest, Hello Friends, Goodbye Friends is a raw and intimate document of Samson’s time in Berlin. A time capsule almost. The songs are steeped in his sadness, his heartache is felt at every turn, the uncertainty of his situation echoes throughout this album, clinging to it like the tape hiss. Everything that went on in those six months can be heard here. The loneliness, the despair, the enduring hope…

Yet this is what is remarkable about this album: considering its self-absorbed nature, it never seems indulgent. In fact, it is utterly absorbing. How Samson manages to pull this off, I don’t know. But there it is. Hello Friends, Goodbye Friends somehow just draws the listener in. The subtle blend of shimmering guitar, brittle piano and haunting electronics, with the hushed whisper of Samson’s sweet voice results in a seamless album that is intricate and considered, and eerily mesmerizing. It’s rare to find an album so complete, so of itself.

Sometimes it’s easy to think there’s enough music already, too much even, you’ve heard it all before, there’s nothing new. And it’s kind of true. This isn’t breaking any moulds, but by God it’s lovely.

There are some records that demand more than your time, they demand your attention, a certain commitment – you can’t just listen to them on the bus on your way to work, the setting’s got to be right. This is one of those records. So go on, switch off your phone, turn down the lights, pull up the sheets, hunker down… Trust me, it’s worth it.

- Graham Sefton for Fluid Radio

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