The poet John Donne once was inspired to write “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.”
Much of this same inspiration is present in “Across the Water”, the first solo project from Fox Farrell, one half of the indie outfit Night Hikes – who you may remember us covering here.
“Something sad makes its way across the water” is the only bio description that Fox Farrell gives on his Bandcamp profile. It’s a familiar tone of reserved reflection that Farrell takes with his record, namely on its sole track of self-rejection, “Albedo”.
As a whole, the album is decorated with tunes that carry this sentiment, all the while scaling an emphasis upon the larger picture: the fact that humankind is tied to a world of deeper existence and as individuals, we are connected to something greater.
While “Across the Water” makes this point for love and unity clearer on some tracks than others, Farrell posits the reality of its antithesis starkly: a destructive disregard for one’s impact on others’ lives is the danger that swims under the shores, which may be the sadness he refers to and warns against falling prey to.
Acoustically, “Across the Water” sparkles with a high-end pop flare and drips with a balanced bit of effect-laden glitch.
“Jolly Roger” starts with a chipper dosing of what sounds like a golden-age questing theme of a Errol Flynn arch-type, before quickly dissolving into a delay-ridden sludge, driven deep with aches of lyric reflecting on perception and the inevitability of change in the people you love.
The synth-pop ear-worm “Love My Baby” could drum its way to the top of any pop chart, an upbeat number with a dreaming recurrent melody and verses that trophy Fox’s knack for writing harmonies. Atop its fluid amber of instrumentation, the track’s hook holds a particularly boyish flair as Farrell punts his vocals into shifting warps of pitch and vibrato to follow suit.
Long in the making for Farrell, the past year’s time was enough to dig more into sound engineering to mix and master his own work. Matching the production, Farrell’s voice shimmers and surges with a magnetic energy well-paired with each of the album’s inter-dimensional psych beats.
The final track, “Extra Innings” loops a jangling of chimes with a simple wondering of why someone cannot come up to his room. Here, the vocals play into what could be almost perceived as a meandering into an openly unexpected RnB riff. The track is cooling and modest inside its shell, a tune that would be eerie if not so caught in its own bittersweet hums. Following “Love My Baby”, this track reads much like the troubled B-side of what’s really biting underneath a flowering surface.
“Across the Water” has the same kind of charm to it that Farrell had just started tapping into with his contributions to Night Hikes. Confirming a followup to Night Hikes’ 2015 debut, “The Blue Hour”, is the next project he’s set his sights on, here’s to Fox only growing in the thoughtful lyricism and attention to craft he’s proven himself capable of thus far.