Welcomer’s Miles Sutton observes the world from a remove, delivering even intimate scenes from an ironic remove. Most of the time, he’s only half singing, through the verse injecting conversational lyrics with the barest tinge of melody. Yet in the chorus, Sutton reveals a fascination with pop: the arrangements bristle with hooks and billow with strings, multi-voiced singing and rock instruments.
This is Sutton’s first full-length album as Welcomer, following a self-titled EP in 2022. The Wellington, New Zealand artist enlisted producer and engineer Jesse Austin-Stewart for this one, working with him to develop layered but buoyant orchestrations for these songs, which glisten and shimmer with trebly picking, swoops of viola and violin, new wave synths and occasional drifts of saxophone.
The songs themselves revolve mostly around the ups and (mostly) downs of romantic love, in elliptic but sharply drawn vignettes. “Aisles,” for instance, is about the wreckage left when a loved one dies. The narrator is desperately seeking some sign of continued presence when a song loved by a dead partner plays at the supermarket. “If it comes on in the right aisle, I’ll stand there in the sound,” Sutton croons, before rejecting the supernatural. “I haven’t noticed any signs thought/I don’s think you stuck around.”
The primary flavor here is acoustic folk pop, but Sutton turns up the temperature a couple of times to good effect. “Impossible” drives and pulses with unmistakable rock energies, as the lyrics sketch out a rebound from heartache: “Sleeping around/Borrowing towels/Each dead boyfriend on a lock screen.” Occasionally the synths push these tracks, too, in a new wave direction, The keyboard part in “Crescents” gleams with late 1970s futurism, recalling OMD in its electro-pop prime.
These songs are curious amalgamations of emotion and reserve, of spare verses and soaring, enveloping choruses. Sutton has a knack for finding the details that make these stories specific, but the music reaches for the universal.
