Judging from the way he looks, no one would be able to tell that Glasgow-based Christopher Duncan is in fact a multi-hyphenate (singer, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist among other things) who has been nominated for a Mercury Prize, one of the most prestigious music awards in the UK. Duncan is also a talented visual artist who has hand-painted all of his album artworks, from Glasgow’s aerial view of the Mercury-approved debut, Architect, to his apartment stairwell of the sophomore The Midnight Sun. Featuring an extreme contrast between turquoise and coral, the cover art of his third record, Health, is of what looks like a seaside swimming pool, his most vibrantly-colored image thus far. It succinctly reflects his music at its most accessible and genre-expanding but also, much like Duncan’s unassuming appearance, masks something unexpected and beguilingly rewarding.
Health marks the first time Duncan works with other producers — one of whom is Elbow’s Craig Potter, engineers, and musicians including his professional violinist parents. His Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker-like architectural wizardry and perfectionist tendencies made his first two albums, which he produced and recorded entirely by himself in his bedroom, such quiet revelations in their own rights. Here, his first musical step out into the sunlight makes itself evident the first few notes into the first single, “Impossible,” an irrevocably catchy, jaunty baroque disco number where his tenor, no longer buried in layers of reverbs, sounds as crisp as the see-sawing strings accompanying it. Duncan purposefully allows his songwriting to take center stage: the song could read as his inner monologue about a long-distance relationship as it could an allegory of his creative process (“I gave you wine / Then you went away.”)
Duncan writes extensively about his personal life, relationships, and mortality in Health. The idea of home is, interestingly, a through line of the album, as each of the songs that makes the record’s nucleus explores this concept from its own unique perspective. At its most traditional definition is “Holiday Home,” a luxe matrimonial escape that slinks effortlessly on funky guitar and Duncan’s falsetto, silky and fraying at the edges. “Somebody Else’s Home” takes a more voyeuristic route, imagining grotesque euphoria of gliding across a stranger’s estate, led by a languorous guitar riff that grows louder and more embellished with each repetition.
Sandwiched between the two is the haunting title track, which likens a relationship with an ex-lover to a house and turns it into a flesh-and-blood character. “If our house and avenue / Were to crumble down to the ground / And cover you / And cut into / And nurture you back to health,” Duncan curses at the debris of memories and faintly delivers the title of the song as if it were his last breath. The inherent sweetness of his voice offsets the sinister energy of minor-key piano and pulsing beat to create an authentically bone-chilling effect, a fine balance — which could have easily tipped over into an overbearing territory — that few artists have achieved.
While most of Health emanates ‘70s yacht rock and disco in modern context — some songs more inventively so than others, Duncan, a Royal Conservatoire of Scotland graduate, often incorporates arpeggiated and choral elements of Highland folk music into his composition. Rich imagery and choir-assisted vocals in “He Came from the Sun,” in which Duncan recites his coming-out experience, and the album closer, “Care,” call to mind Sufjan Stevens’s ecclesiastical work. These songs are equipped with emotional punches that other stylishly-arranged numbers lack, and despite slight disproportions and impurities, the album becomes more lushly textured and full of clandestine characteristics because of them. In this sense, Health is a pop record that recontextualizes that strange swimming pool in its cover art. The block of solid-looking body of water is in fact a product of stroke upon stroke of acrylic paints, laboriously smoothed over to make such a glossy surface.
Review Like Nobody's Reading 