Will Shenton
It bums me out that we don't get a lot of vast, dramatic ballads these days. Maybe it's just the fault of my own little myopic bubble (every time I lament the loss of some genre, I get badgered with a dozen counterexamples until I concede on grounds of attrition), but it seems like the border between cerebral experimentation and guitar-solo catharsis is often a little too stark. That's why The World All Around's debut single, "Gone Be For Lovers," is so damn refreshing.
It opens on a quiet, crescendoing orchestral progression, overlaid with the shimmering sounds of hammered-on guitar strings, before abruptly resolving itself into a wash of synths and Arp's understated vocals. The first instrumental chorus introduces a soaring guitar arpeggio, which subsides back into the verse before it can completely resolve. But then, after another moment of relative stillness, "Gone Be For Lovers" explodes into one of the more brilliantly cathartic lead guitar licks I've heard in a long time.
The song is fairly short, coming in just under three minutes, but it doesn't feel like it needs to be any longer. It manages to distill the energy of more meandering tracks into a concentrate, using the well-trod structure so artfully that its resolution is absolutely satisfying. The group itself is a duo consisting of Hayden Arp (whose solo work we've written about before) and Griffin Jennings, both students at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. The World All Around is a new project of theirs, and with a debut this strong, we hope "Gone Be For Lovers" is the first of many things we'll hear from them.