eponymous 4

Music

Restraint

TRACK	TITLE
1	The One to Make You Whole
2	Without Nothing
3	Letter I
4	Release
5	All the Times I Remember
6	On Paper
7	Speechless
8	Melt
9	Emancipation
10	Reticence
11	Letter II
12	Strange Arrangement
13	Restraint

About this album

The premise of this album is simple: Avoid common chord progressions.

That means bass lines moving in half steps and thirds instead of fourths and fifths, songs using nothing but major chords, melodies vacillating between sharps, flats and naturals. The style of the song didn't matter -- just so long as the I-IV-V is kept to a minimum.

Within those parameters, the music takes drastic turns. One track goes for '80s new wave, another for '80s college rock. One song suits a jazz trio, another an orchestra. A piano ballad plays with quiet explosions in the distance, and two sides of a correspondence never gets sent.

That is Restraint, a messy album with songs that barely work together but somehow do. A work that doesn't aim for ambition but ends up reaching for it in the end. An album that thinks its normal, not realizing it's really slightly odd.

The first sketches for these songs were made in 1999, before I could really build a decent home studio. They lay dormant till 2005, when I started laying down tracks for these ideas. Soon enough, they became an album.

Somewhere in all the twists and turns of Restraint lies the heart of a pop album, and there is where its charms are revealed.