Project Description

ROSTAM‘Half-Light’ (Album Review)

ROSTAM

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Rostam Batmanglij has had an interesting career. He’s worked as a songwriter and producer for some of pop’s biggest names, from Charli XCX and Carly Rae Jepsen to the more recent Declan McKenna and HAIM, not to mention his own work as one of the founding members of Grammy-award winning band Vampire Weekend. However, since his departure from his commercial successes, we have been long awaiting Rostam’s first solo music release. Today, Half-Light answered our art pop prayers and it serves as a reminder of the ever-growing abilities Rostam brings to the music industry as a songwriter, composer and vocalist.

Half-Light starts with the introductory track of ‘Sumer’. Like a modern day Christmas carol, its seasonal instrumentation filled with sweet delicacy, rhythmic shocks and soft vocal deliverance. The lyrics are reminiscent of a inner revival, short and sweet before collapsing into an explosion of orchestral euphoria. This explosion makes ‘Sumer’ the perfectly unorthodox beginning to Rostam’s post-Vampire Weekend soundtrack.

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“Baby, all the lights came up to illuminate the room
Blinded me, I shut my eyes to see an imprint there of you”

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This hopeful instrumentation continues on as a staple throughout this colourful 15-track album. We experience Rostam’s ability to conceive sticky sweet choruses though the exuberant ‘Bike Dream’, the pulsating ‘Never Going To Catch Me’ and the abrupt ‘Don’t Let It Get To You’. The showcase between these instant indie anthems and soft ballads like ‘I Will See You Again’ and the title track ‘Half-Light’ captures a strong range of capabilities that Rostam can create. All while keeping a constant sound that completes this collection of songs into an album.

Throughout this album, Rostam exhibits a love of juxtaposition and texture. This is seen in ‘Thatch Snow’, a composition of quick pulsating orchestral sounds with long drawn-out vocals. The songs ‘Wood’ and ‘When’ strip back to Rostam’s Persian roots, a thick texture of sounds and colours all while incorporating unique melodies that continue the instrumentative optimism of Half-Light.

Towards the end of the album, we see Rostam using a vocoder to emphasise his voice. ‘Hold You’ symbolises a distinctive difference between him and guest vocalist Angel Deradoorian‘s emotions on the track and ‘Warning Intruders’ show a sadder side to Rostam’s madness. However, these are the only times we see strife on Half-Light. Songs like ‘Rudy’ and ‘EOS’ weigh up this sadness in the second half of the album with sounds reminiscent of Rostam’s times with Vampire Weekend, however they still carry heavy lyrical content.

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‘Gwan’, easily one of the best songs off the album, serves as a perfect goodbye with its delicate violins and nostalgia-filled lyrics. There are simple narrative lines in it like, “And sometimes I laugh when I think about how you know me” that not only find resemblance in other’s lives but make you feel joyful about the people you know in life and the happiness music brings as a soundtrack to people’s lives. It grabs your heart strings before slowing its tempo with a small ballad and flatlining to a final encore, an acoustic reprise of ‘Don’t Let It Get To You’.

As an album, Half-Light serves as a beacon of hope, filled with only snippets of what we haven’t seen from Rostam with previous endeavours. Encased with honest songwriting, Half-Light shows a type of innocence and wonder that we need in the light of recent events. This is only just the beginning of Rostam‘s solo career. The limelight is now on him and boy, am I excited to see where he goes from here.

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ROSTAM.

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AMNPLIFY – DB

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