Dancing on the Edge

I love-hate these albums that have songs stretching seven minutes or more. Most of the time, it's a miss: self-indulgence masked as ambition, with a knack for not knowing when to stop. Ryan Davis knows where to stop.

Despite jumping around a host of different themes like grief, love, regret, and nostalgia, it all weaves around the central theme of life passing. Free From the Guillotine explores breaking away from the mold of work and enjoying life. Learn 2 Re-Luv is exactly what the name suggests: learning to love oneself to love another human.

But at the same time, Dancing on the Edge shows a very humane side that's especially present today: a freeze in ambition and a loop of our own fear. Life doesn't stop; it accelerates past the point where we can do anything about it. This whole picture is demonstrated from the middle of the album onwards. Bluebirds in a Fight has a great line: "The future's a joke played on the present by the past." There is no progression, and we're stuck in our own little ecosystem of two parents, past and future, bending the present to its breaking point.

Junk Drawer Heart is another song that's practically an antithesis to Learn 2 Re-Luv. There isn't a light at the end of the tunnel, just a slow decay, a hoarding of unnecessary stuff, and maybe the rare gold coin that makes you not lose all hope.

And if you think the album is purely about lost hope, you're dead wrong. Despite the album descending into its bleakest stretch from Flashes of Orange and the regrets it displays onwards, in A Suitable Exit, Davis drops the line: "For death has loaned us to life." It's not a surrender. It's a release from the terms. If the time was never his to keep, he can stop fighting for it and start using it. The album isn't gloom dressed in sarcasm. It's a record about coming to terms with time, and then doing something worthwhile to pass it.