That Ben Howard can play musical hopscotch, flitting from one style to the next, while maintaining a melodic and musical identity is testament to the English singer-songwriter’s preternatural talents. His approach to music is intrinsically natural to him, and hitherto unique from everyone else. The finger-plucked guitar popularised by him was a technique born from necessary adaptation, allowing a left-handed Howard to play the instrument as he wishes. For him, challenges have been invitations to innovate. This pioneering instinct flows like an undercurrent through Howard’s latest album, Is It?, which itself is a paean to the creative potential of experiencing a struggle.
Is It? follows in the wake of Howard’s recent medical traumas, with the artist having suffered two mini-strokes, the first of which arrived while he was sitting in his garden listening to music. The experiences left Howard pondering the fragility of not only life, but of our very faculties as living organisms. “I found it impossible not to dwell on the absurdity of it, that with one tiny clot, one can lose all faculties,” he said when speaking about the album. “It really ate into the writing of the record.” In this sense, Is It? carries significant weight, though most of the sounds here skew toward effortlessly breezy or sumptuously dreamy folktronica. There’s a juxtaposition between the album’s outer brightness and more pensive ruminnations, but it’s the sort of juxtaposition that lends gravitas rather than causes confusion. Couldn’t Make It Up, for instance, addresses Howard’s stroke directly in lyrics, while musically it’s one of the album’s sunnier moments. It echoes his response to the experience: “I was told to sit still, and instead I thought: ‘I need to make a record quickly’.”
Moonraker is another track that reflects Howard’s current outlook on life, commiserating our insistent pursuit of ‘pointless’ or meaningless activities in the name of pleasure. It takes shape as a gentle lullaby that trickles along a rhythmic electronic loop and gently plucked guitar. Stylistically, Is It? is incredibly diverse, pulling inspiration from Howard’s earlier, acoustically driven work (Little Plant), while touching on his recent experiments in ambient and electronica (Interim Of Sense, Spirit). Though compared to the rest of Howard’s discography, Is It? is remarkably simple. Its barebones honesty works in favour of the album’s purpose as an introspective piece of self-reflection. There’s something deeply intimate and personal at work beneath its sparse exterior. Is It? is a self-portrait in song. It captures with pangs of melancholy and strokes of nostalgia Howard making peace with what has happened, rediscovering himself on the other side of a life-altering experience, and moving forward as an artist reborn.
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