A flat bicycle tyre, watching Die Hard on an aunt’s couch, clapping when a plane touches down, a therapist’s number scribbled on a post-it. BLUAI don’t need much to set a bigger story in motion on ‘The Way You Talk Reminds Me Of Home’. Its eleven songs often begin with small things: conversations, habits and memories that gradually reveal something about the way people live with each other.
Two years after debut album ‘Save It For Later’, the Antwerp trio look backwards as often as they look ahead. Not out of nostalgia, but because growing older has a habit of changing the past too. Parents become people with shortcomings of their own, a warm childhood memory takes on a different meaning years later, and someone you haven’t seen in a long time can suddenly sound familiar again with a single turn of phrase. On ‘Greta’s Couch’, an old sofa is still there even though the house that once surrounded it has been demolished. It’s a simple image that holds much of ‘The Way You Talk Reminds Me Of Home’: some things disappear, while others stubbornly remain.
This isn’t a traditional coming-of-age record with a tidy set of lessons waiting at the end. BLUAI are more interesting when the answers don’t arrive. ‘On Killing Time’, adulthood still feels a little like playing house; ‘Runner Up’ lays out a catalogue of shortcomings without asking for much sympathy; and on ‘Rosanne’, advice is offered with the quiet understanding that nobody really has it all figured out. Elsewhere, a relationship reaches the point where leaving is kinder than staying, an old friend is trying to get sober, and ambition rubs up against the self-doubt of trying to make a life in music. The characters change, but a question keeps resurfacing: how much of what we inherit do we carry with us, and what do we try to do differently along the way?
Musically, BLUAI decided not to spend too long second-guessing the answers either. With producer Isabel Gracefield (Adele, Dua Lipa, PJ Harvey, Radiohead), the band headed to London’s legendary RAK Studios, where all eleven songs were recorded live in just five days, followed by a single day of overdubs. Frontwoman Cath sang while the band played, often capturing the final vocal in one take. Some songs were recorded with only one or two microphones. There was little opportunity to move things around or smooth them over afterwards: the timing, dynamics and interplay had to work in the room.
The approach suits BLUAI. On ‘The Way You Talk Reminds Me Of Home’, the band sound looser and more instinctive than before, but what stands out just as much is knowing when not to play. Guitars, bass and drums leave room around Cath’s voice, then open up together when a song calls for it. There are traces of Feist, Adrianne Lenker and MJ Lenderman in that balance between intimacy and the sound of a band audibly sharing the same room. Willem Ardui (blackwave.), who produced ‘Save It For Later’, joined them again, while multi-instrumentalist Juyane Kaya (Sarah Julia) expanded the trio during the sessions.
The album’s title appears almost in passing on ‘Sober’, a song about someone trying to find their way back to solid ground: the way you talk reminds me of home. Perhaps that is what ultimately connects these eleven songs. Home isn’t necessarily somewhere you return to. It can linger in the way someone speaks, in the things families keep repeating, in rooms that no longer exist, or in behaviour you only realise years later you’ve carried with you. On ‘The Way You Talk Reminds Me Of Home’, BLUAI don’t try to settle any of that once and for all. They look at it, turn it over, and write another song about it.
