New Kind of Familiar, his second album under the Clever Hopes moniker, Andrew Shaver explores the texture of transition
Nothing ever really, truly ends. Even with our sights set on the future, once a significant event—a love lost, a love found, the birth of a child, the death of a friend—passes, we're bound to our memory's eternal return. On New Kind of Familiar, his second album under the Clever Hopes moniker, Andrew Shaver explores the texture of transition with lush folk-rock and poetic lyricism, from a liminal vantage point that offers both views of where he's come from and the places he might be headed.
Between writing his debut Clever Hopes album, Artefact, and the songs that comprise New Kind of Familiar, Shaver experienced his fair share of significant events—falling in love, moving to Nova Scotia, becoming a father. These are the things occupying his mind on the new record, and yet, they don't exist in a vacuum; Shaver rejects tidy narratives and time's linear arrow, and instead lets the album take shape with the same flow and verve of real life, bouncing back and forth in his lyrics between memory, the glorious, the complicated present, and anticipation.
The result is appropriately dreamy, drifting, rhythmic, and charged. On the record's soulful, simmering opener, "The Only One," Shaver's dusky delivery plays foil to longtime collaborator Eva Foote's airy vocals as he tentatively moves into new romance while acknowledging the lingering sting of a past breakup. The horn-blasted "Thrown It Open" finds him fully fallen into a big love and embracing the unknown; haunted pedal steel colours the reflective "Holes" as the relationship shifts and unsettles; with the quick-shuffling "Blue Parachutes," hazy memories of a lost year in Australia convince the songwriter's present self to pull it together.
"There was a lot of looking back on Artefact," Shaver says. "New Kind of Familiar is far more forward looking; there are songs on which I've been able to celebrate the place I'm in now - a place of stability and clarity.
As Shaver puts it: "I love a slow fade to black."
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