Sleep Through The Storm is the fifth album from James Vella’s A Lily. Beginning in 2006 with wake:sleep and continuing over the past fourteen years, Vella’s music under the A Lily name has been one of utmost flexibility, shifting his stylistic impulses refreshingly from drones to electronic pop with each release, without worrying about any sort of back catalogue compatibility issues. 

His latest album finds Vella in a deeply contemplative frame of mind as he reflects on the parlous state of the world we call home in 2020. Outwardly simple yet richly complex beneath the surface, these eight pieces are the electronic equivalent of putting on a brave face when, inside, you are trying to manage the swirling emotions and myriad anxieties that seem to have existed in our daily realities for the past twenty years or more. 

Opener ‘Endless Jasmine’ is presented as cluster of rapidly coruscating tones. Their presentation vividly recalls listening to peeling bells celebrating some joyous occasion, but instead they feel claustrophobic, relentlessly devoid of any sort of release. The deceptively beatific ‘A Softly Glitching Reality’ evokes the melodies of Vella’s work for piano, with subtly abrasive dissonance and slow filters giving the piece an uncertain, indecisive, troubled timbre.

The album’s centrepiece, the almost title track ‘Slept Through The Storm’ poses the question we’d all like to ask ourselves: what if this was all just a dream? What if that daily creeping dread and relentless non-specific unease and all the multitudes of hellish headlines we are confronted with were all just figments of our imagination? The track exists with a cautious optimism, spirals of wispy melodic cycles floating upwards, encircled by criss-crossing textural motifs. 

‘Slept Through The Storm’ sets the tone for the remainder of the album, which proceeds with a gracefulness (if you’re feeling optimistic) or a sense of resignation (if you’re not). The album concludes with the slowly-evolving countermelody of ‘Slipped At The Edge Of The Pool’, a haunting, reflective, sweetly-fluctuating refrain that stays with you long after the album has ebbed away into a heavy, bereft silence. 

Sleep Through The Storm by A Lily is released October 16 2020 by Bytes. 

Words: Mat Smith 

(c) 2020 Further.