LP REVIEW
Ayfer Simms poetically navigates the Isle of Man guitarist Mikie Daughtery‘s latest release as the post-rock/experimental Nanaki – his first album under the moniker since 2003. No stranger to this blog, we’ve previously played host to his work in the shoegaze dreamy troupe Postcode. But it is his Nanaki alter ego that bookended 2014; releasing an EP at the start of that year and finishing it with The Dying Light LP.
Nanaki ‘The Dying Light’ (Small Bear Records) Released 31st December 2014
‘Nanaki, where the dark clouds are’
Everything is made of steel; the seagulls are floating in the air like instrumental notes caught in the middle of a mood, a guitar cracks inside a glass bottle thrown out in the immensity of the sea: A prayer for all, for the glimmer buried inside the heart, for the people that are gone and for those who are here yet. Nanaki’s horizon line is the space before silence falls, the last minutes before it all ends.
The album is reflective, giving a sense of the everlasting question: Why? Yearning? Subdued anger against the light that falls on earth with a slant touch rather than bright as a glorious summer day, against the fog that traps a humid and chilly air to launch it on our land.
Nanaki kneels down like a Celtic indie knight in front of the mass of dark clouds: It roars at it, dances for it, curses at it, confronts it and in the very end sends tears to it, hoping to get some love in return.
Nanaki is about life and death and the trespassing of borders, the absurdity of us having to say goodbye: A Bronowski that declares, “I am sad to leave because I will miss you all”.
The Celtic atmosphere is present in the background, from the depth of the land surrounded by vastness, it echoes in form of discreet sounds, like heavy drops resonating in somber caves from an ancient world, weaved in with the indie soul as if sewed with a thread made of the alternative rock guitars. Titles like ‘Hiraeth’ are a wistful longing for the lost nest; we wonder where the den is, lost forever? We are plunged at times in a “Wild at heart” atmosphere, Nanaki sends us on a long stretch of road where crashed cars lay, offering its dead like a canny present: There we witness our own end, with fear and yet a romantic desire to be “all right”.
The album is moody, hypnotic, and runs like a tamed wild beast on the greatness of a Kafkaesque landscape.
Writer: Ayfer Simms
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