Ben Howard’s Exploratory New Album Reveals Growth

I Forget Where We Were, the second full-length album by English singer-songwriter Ben Howard strays from the sanguine sentimentality that he became known for with his 2011 Brit Award-winning, debut album Every Kingdom. This latest release is heavier, slower, and much darker. Howard doesn’t shy away from the weighty themes of failure and loss, but rather lingers on them, taking listeners through a reflective and emotionally potent shedding of old skin.

I Forget Where We Were harkens back to Howard’s EP The Burgh Island E.P., deriving greater influence from electric and complex instrumentation, rather than the acoustic and folky motif that Howard employed with “Every Kingdom.” While Howard’s acoustic guitar and intricate finger-work are still very much present in many of the songs, the thrust of this album relies heavily on Howard’s greater experimentation with the electric guitar and effects devices.

The intense and elongated melancholy that pervades Howard’s sophomore release makes his first seem almost lackluster. The tracks are tempestuous and yet, manage to form together and reach a state of fluidity in a way that feels meditative, if not dreamlike. The album wades introspectively in waters of loneliness and disillusionment without being drowned by them.

Howard avoids the benign and formulaic pattern that so often comprises indie-folk songs and refuses to regurgitate simplistic, sing-a-long lyrical structures that make up some of his past commercial successes such as “Old Pine,” “Keep Your Head Up,” and “Only Love.”

Howard further explores his musical capabilities by not conforming to the typical, radio-friendly song length. The longest track on the album “End of the Affair” is nearly eight minutes long, and it is one of the uncanniest of the bunch. It begins with a somber but lovely guitar intro, with Howard’s familiar lilt agonizing over the aftermath of a failed relationship, segueing half-way through into a blurring chaos of delayed and reverb-soaked guitar tones, an intricate well-executed drum-line, and howling, obscured vocals.

While perhaps not as quickly or easily digestible as his debut album, after several solitary listenings, I Forget Where We Were slowly permeates and proves to be an infinitely more satisfying exploration of the self. It pushes the boundaries of Howard’s previous limiting, mild, and mass-packaged sound into loftier spaces that defies definition and is somehow peacefully languid in all its dissonance.

Notable tracks: “Small Things,” “I Forget Where We Were,” “Time is Dancing,” “End of the Affair,” and “Conrad.”