Colin Stetson’s “The love it took to leave you” is his first true solo release since 2017’s fantastic “All this I do for glory.” This new album is massive in so many ways—big sounds, big tracks, big ambition—and includes techniques from or references to some of the stuff that Stetson’s been working on the last few years: his soundtracks, collaborations, and drone experiments. As always, the basic reaction, for me, to a Colin Stetson record is still disbelief at the manner in which he makes this music. You listen to these recordings and you think, how? And then you watch some videos of Stetson performing, which you think would make it more clear, but it’s still kind of mind-boggling. Like watching Messi make a pass between defenders to a winger making a run or Steph Curry hit a way-off-balance three—it’s clear that the person is actually doing it, but it doesn’t become any less sensational or more graspable because you can see it.
Beyond that initial awe and admiration for the physical acts of Stetson’s music playing, there’s also fascination with the sounds he creates, his melodies, the emotion of his music. Stetson said something, in relation to this record about how he could only play these songs like this now, and that feels true. This record sounds richer and fuller than his older records. He’s harnessing that incredible technique in new ways.
Listening to the title track (also the first track on the album), it struck me that the pulses and oscillations that Stetson produces are essentially like a machine or something extra-human. I think if I listened to this record cold without any knowledge of how it was made, I would guess that there was a synthesizer producing bass pulses, a couple tightly synchronized woodwinds, and someone howling through a muted megaphone. But it’s just him. I think keeping that in mind makes tracks like “The love it took to leave you” even more poignant, because it’s all Stetson, expressing what sounds to me like anguish, resignation, despondency, throughout the stormy movements of this track. A superhuman effort of expression.
Tracks like “Hollowing” and, right after it, “To think we knew from fear” feel very influenced by Stetson’s soundtrack work—there’s a heavy demonstrativeness on these two tracks that seems like it would match up well with heightened action on the screen. “Hollowing” has some of the hardest percussion on the album, along with some deeper, growling sounds from Stetson’s sax, and a high, keening singing. It moves and lurches like a creature in a horror movie, uncanny, menacing. “To think we knew from fear” sort of continues the big percussion from “Hollowing,” though it’s slower, more martial. This song feels more like a summoning of terrible troops, a parade of force.
There are two long songs on the album, “Malediction” and “Strike your forge and grin,” that also showcase different aspects of Stetson’s techniques. The pulses of notes on “Malediction” come so quickly and sound like they’re coming from three directions at once. The sax on “Malediction” behaves less like a sax and more like a fingerpicked guitar—the playing sounds like that, many intricate phrases entangled with each other, patterns that are hard to parse.
“Strike your forge and grin” is a 21+ minute song, all of it essential. With this one, you can really hear some of the influence of what Stetson did with the big drones on “Chimaera.” There’s nothing quite as stretched out as what he did on that album, but there are sections of that engage with that style (especially at the start of the song). (I’m not really sure how he even does this, playing a long tone with another intermittent tone on top of it). He establishes this buzzing drone with occasional eruptions for the first five minutes of the track, and then the percussion comes in, a shattering hit. He keeps this pattern going, adding ornamentation here and there, until about the halfway mark, when he breaks into what sounds like a gallop. The buzzing drone remains in the background, Stetson’s keys clacking at a steady rhythm, and his vocals become more prominent. It keeps getting faster and faster, more frantic and unsettling, a generator overheating, coming apart. Until around 18:30, when the huge percussive hits return and Stetson combines the two major modes of the track, like he’s annealing two alloys together. An incredible track on an incredible album.