Case, Brian: Parallel Voices LP

Chicagoan Brian Case is returning to Hands in the Dark with his fourth release under his own name, Parallel Voices. In a sense, the album is elliptical: Whilst, musically speaking, the American artist comes back to the start of his solo work by producing a fully instrumental album, he also delivers a story which informs the landscape Case lives in now, and always imbibes it with a sense of tension and dark undercurrents. You might think at first that the voice he uses is abstract, however the work leads us to realise that music is the language itself, delivering a concrete narrative through the album. The message flows freely, with a palpable friction bubbling at the surface all the way through, mirroring the tense and disturbing atmosphere that has settled across the globe over the last few months. Brian Case takes us in a new artistic direction with his most personal album to date, in the form of an urgent and poignant testimony.