Addy Weitzman - Light Months Will Fly Over Us [Slacker 85]

Format: Green colored LP.

Addy Weitzman’s debut album, Light Months Will Fly Over Us, explores new wave, romantic pop and art rock with elegance and ambition, bringing together Weitzman’s scattered network of collaborators as well as a “frighteningly vast personal archive” of compositions. Sequenced by Seth Troxler and released on his label Slacker 85, it represents a turn in the label’s musical direction and serves as a showcase of the songwriting craft Weitzman honed as a member of cult electro duo Footprintz and Montreal synth-pop projects The Beat Escape and Dawn to Dawn.

The title Light Months Will Fly Over Us comes from a line in a poem by Russian writer Anna Akhmatova. Weitzman was immediately captivated by its “hope, its mystery... it conveys the feeling of being suspended, hanging in a dreamlike state.” This interpretation carries over into the album, full of memorable compositions that nonetheless invite the listener to delve deeper. Carefully mixed by engineer Pierre Guerineau (known for his work with Marie Davidson), each of the eight songs gently probes life’s great mysteries: fear, love, and salvation, all defining and revealing the human soul.

The opening track, End of The Line, introduces us to a lush space of lounge existentialism, where gentle brass and piano accompany Weitzman to present “where the journey begins and fantasy dies.” Amidst orchestral arrangements by Adam Wilcox, whose sensitive and ambitious compositions intertwine throughout the album, Beyond The Speed of Life evokes the laments of Scott Walker. Navigating between vulnerability and grandeur, Weitzman's heartfelt voice flourishes in an intense dialogue with the object of a transcendent love.

Alongside collaborator Richard Lamb, the LP's next phase delves into machine-driven mood contrasts: the tongue-in-cheek and bubbling Entertainment Is All I Wanted (And I Found It) is imbued with the playful, experimental spirit of 80s electronic pioneers like Fad Gadget, while the harsher, icier Stranger To Your Kind takes a more instrumental direction, evoking both Weitzman's dancefloor experience and contemporaries like Matthew Dear.

The album's centerpiece and standout first single, Running & Returning, inaugurates a trilogy of tracks in collaboration with Patrick Boivin, Weitzman's bandmate in The Beat Escape and Dawn to Dawn. Combining enveloping saxophones and angular guitars with a nostalgic melodic flair, its irresistible art rock rhythm provides the foundation for one of Weitzman's most captivating vocal performances.

This is followed by an anthem to existential absurdity: Ice Cream Candle offers a vibrant acceptance that “the more you learn, the less you understand”; Weitzman embraces that uncertainty with equal grace in No Man's Land, where baroque invocations like “words swept across the fields” and “the meeting where water lilies grow” give way to a searing guitar solo, sustained over hypnotic percussion.

For the compassionate closing of Light Months Will Fly Over Us, Weitzman narrates the experience of Gabrielle, a woman who glides between rooms and closed blinds in the imposing city, “where the air is filled with cigarettes and roses.”

As lyrically delicate as it is musically ambitious, Light Months Will Fly Over Us is a sublime debut album, steeped in care, love, and a much-needed spell.