Active Child - Evening Ceremony

Melancholia never sounded as lovely nor as honest as it does in the hands of Pat Grossi.

There’s a close-to-the-bone quality to Active Child’s orchestrally emotive music that, even now, doesn’t fail to shock. Despite being couched in all the trappings of comfort – plush harps, layered falsetto vocals and muffled angelic strings – on his new song Evening Ceremony he comes swaggering out of the mist to startle his listener with moments of finely-tuned, hard-to-hear honesty. Right from the confrontational opening lines of “Even if I wanted to love you, would you love me?/ Even if I wanted to fall for you, would you fall for me?”, the track is less a hand-holding sympathy session and more a prickly catharsis that comes with all the discomfort and rough edges of truly expressed emotion. It’s that knee-jerk, laugh-cry quality of almost awkward honesty that Pat Grossi’s music has always had that keeps me coming back to his music time and again, and on Evening Ceremony he exudes it.