Album Review
Soon
by Hana Stretton
Words By Sam Andersen // Photos By Zoe Helene
Soon Album Art
You may not be able to tell exactly what's around you with Hana Stretton’s lush soundscapes, but you know that you are safe and that you are warm.
Some of the most intimate, emotional moments I experience with my instrument tend to be when I'm alone in my room. Bonus points if the sun is setting. It's in these moments that something is being born – a song, some expression of myself. Although the song may be in its infancy, I find that that's the most exciting part. There is so much left to the imagination. In that moment, there is this vivid, nearly tangible emotional closeness. You don't want it to leave. When you come out of it, it almost feels like waking up from a dream.
Soon is the sound of Hana Stretton catching this emotional lightning in a bottle, with wistful acoustic ambience and field recordings as her backdrop.
The pastoral field recordings are one of my favorite textures on the album. They wrap around the songs like a warm blanket. However, the nature of the recordings makes you question what you are really hearing. Is that a dog panting or two pieces of wood being rubbed together? Was that a gurgling brook or static from a radio? It's almost like when you were a child drifting in and out of sleep in a grown-up’s arms. You may not be able to tell exactly what's around you, but you know that you are safe and that you are warm.
The more I listen to this album, the more influences I can hear. Almost everything on the record has this hot tape timbre to it, as if it was recorded on a 4-track that was on its last leg. The fluttering of these tapey guitar sounds reminded me Mid-Air Thief's folktronica opus, Crumbling (무너지기). In fact, it almost sounds as if Soon is the album's more contemplative reserved cousin. Made of the same stuff, but with an entirely different personality.
Some tracks even sound like extended cuts from the droney, blissful outros of My Bloody Valentine songs. The choir-like vocals on the album are reminiscent not only of Mid-Air Thief, but of Bon-Iver's work as well.
Hana's layered voice drifts in and out with the breeze.
As for the lyrics of the album, they still remain a mystery to me, as it's hard to make out most of the words that Hana is singing. On some songs like “Can II,” it sounds like Hana is simply repeating the name of the song.
On others, like “Changing Weather,” there appears to be a slightly more developed palette of words. All in all, the majority of the vocals appear to serve primarily as a compositional element within the song, rather than taking on the role of the song's centerpiece. This may be irritating to some people, but for me this is usually an enhancement to the music itself (especially on ambient folk albums such as this).
This actually made me think of the Reykjavík-based post-rock group Sigur Rós. On their critically-acclaimed album, Ágaetis byrjun (a good beginning), there is a song in which frontman Jón Þór Birgisson sings in a language he calls Vonlenska (although most tend to refer to it as "Hopelandic"). This was done for the first time before on their song “Von.” Their following record, (), was sung entirely in Vonlenska. The funny thing is that Vonlenska isn't an actual language at all. It is composed completely of sounds and vocalizations rather than words.
This may seem ridiculous to most, but I find this to be a wonderful use of the human voice. I find that lots of the time, we are so caught up in questions like “what does x mean?” and “what are they saying?” that we are distracted from the most important, preeminent export of music: emotion (this could be a hot take, idk).
I think that vocals on both Soon and Ágaetis byrjun (and most of Bon Iver's music for that matter) play a similar role, to convey the emotion of the song. The meaning of words is almost always essential in a literary setting. But I believe that in a musical setting what is being felt is just as important (if not more important) than what is being said.