Tim Darcy – Saturday Night
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Tim Darcy Saturday Night Jagjaguwar

07.03.17

Saturday Night begins in full voice, with Tim Darcy’s oddball ideas made flesh and blood by choral harmonies and occasionally harsh but often velveteen arrangements. “You got a tall glass of water and you’re bored with it, bored with it!” the Ought frontman announces on the opening track, delighted, like a wayward preacher exposing the holes in his rhetoric as he’s in the business of delivering it. “At the end of the river, there is… more river!” Warbled, incisive lyrics leap over the barn-dance swagger of strummed guitars, and introduce the magnetic world of Darcy’s eccentric imagination.

Written and recorded, for the most part, whilst Darcy was working on Ought’s LP Sun Coming Down, this debut solo LP is a document of borrowed minutes in an out-of-hours rehearsal space. Over ten tracks Darcy freewheels through chaotic, romantic song-writing that pays greater dues to folk balladry than Ought’s usual post-punk output, and peels back to a shivering, vibrant kind of intimacy. Still Waking Up sees Darcy figure himself as an old-fashioned crooner, borrowing half-finished phrases from time-burnished love songs to pinpoint the queasy feeling of falling too deep, too fast in to a relationship that’s unlikely to last. You Felt Comfort builds poetic, nostalgic neurosis in to a bittersweet, euphoric unravelling that feels like a long lost Jeff Mangum B Side, while Found My Limit strips down to an dreamlike chiming, ticking, tapping as Darcy slurs and murmurs. The oldest song on the record, Saint Germain, ruminates on creation and self-discovery as the vocals drown in a psychedelic sea of echoes and cymbals, reaching us from somewhere else.

Saturday Night is violent and warm, seeding new life and capturing Darcy’s unexpectedly theatrical range with heart, humour and generosity. Over the title track’s bruising strings, he offers a sermon on the importance of fighting for space to think: “Wish I’d run away sooner, to save time.”