"redemptive and merciless"
Some songs create inviting atmospheres that we like to float into taking us away from our current state, mental or otherwise and other songs feel more like stories to be told. The story might be personal, might feel like an intimate personal reflection or it might feel more like a kind of poetic diorama to display larger ideas or philosophies about our inner or outer worlds. The song The Bees Do Not Sleep from Irish singer-songwriter Joseph Kiernan accomplishes all that. You feel a chilly vibe full of sadness and contemplation within the sustained synths and Kiernan's vocal aesthetic (who reminds me a bit of Ben Gibbard). Once, the beat starts the song feels less church like but all along there is a beautiful building of story and guitar lines. The production even though pulled back to reveal Kiernan's compelling voice, is interesting, vibrant and so moving. The words elude to distance by time and wants and when the song sonically shifts you feel deeper narratives that feel so cinematic. Wow.
The Bees Do Not Sleep is the opening track from Joseph Kiernan's forthcoming EP.
-Robb Donker Curtius
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM - PRESS NOTES:
The Bees Do Not Sleep is the opening track from Joseph Kiernan's forthcoming EP. The song speaks to a sudden grappling, which lays bare cadences of vulnerability surrounding our innermost fears and our inseparability from our environment.
BIO:
Beneath the familiar and hard to reach places. Before I ever named this place. Therein lies the mystery - nowhere to escape, nothing to embrace.
Joseph Kiernan is a songwriter from Wicklow, Ireland. His debut EP delivers a subtly cultivated body of work that is redemptive and merciless. A musical cartography of sonic confessions of vulnerability, loss, courage and surrender.
Kiernan headed into the studio in late 2017 with longtime friend Pete Meighan following a number of personal losses. “There was a growing need at that time to document those losses in an intimate way.” The pair retreated to the attic of Meighan's house that winter for a week to create a document. The songs chosen for this collection are connected by a timeless thread fused together by fractured melodies and broken soundscapes. The songs arrived in old rehearsal rooms, friends apartments, on long haul flights and in the basement of an old chocolate factory.
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