Mutual Benefit: Thunder Follows the Light (original) (raw)

Throughout the album, Lee carefully avoids any political stance; for Lee, there is no hardship that cannot be overcome with intimacy and affection. On album opener “Written in Lightning,” he embeds himself into the farmer’s market crowd, asking, “If love is an armor, then can we love stronger?” On “Storm Cellar Heart,” Lee romanticizes taking shelter from a storm with a lover by his side: “When you hold me, it’s so much better; it’s enough to drown out the thunder.” This doe-eyed optimism is easily digestible, and that is perhaps the biggest issue: the realities Lee purports to write about are not easy.

Though the lyrical themes may lack potency, Thunder Follows the Light highlights Lee’s knack for composing beautiful melodies. It is densely packed with bespoke orchestration, filled with glittering piano and mellow horns. Lee’s voice, as always, is lilting and gentle, so hypnotically rhythmic that it often recalls children’s lullabies. On “No Dominion,” he strikes an agreeable balance of muted, contemplative piano and somber, religious lyrics: the title is a reference to a poem by Dylan Thomas, which in turn references St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans. The sentiment is heavy, arguing for the perseverance of an ineffable soul after our earthly bodies no longer occupy this earth. For a brief moment, as he sings about reciting Thomas’s morbid poem, his voice drops and flattens. It is a welcome reflection of the sobering topics at hand, and proof that Lee can write an affecting and serious ballad.

But too often, the preciousness of the album’s instrumentation seems cloying in the face of such weighty subjects. Meditations on historical ignorance like “New History” are mismatched with the cheery vocal harmonies that deliver them. A solemn commentary on rising sea levels, “Waves Breaking,” is sadly drowned out by the song’s overcrowded arrangement and muddled metaphors. For Lee, romantic and even fantastical idealism has long been a means to parse his inner demons. But when those demons become too large for charming poetics, beatific melodies and jangling orchestral compositions fail to rise to the occasion.