Everything Grows. Nagasaki Swim

There are albums that make an immediate impression. There are albums that take their time to grow and there are albums that never do anything (and ones that are really not for me). Nagasaki Swim's second album is in the second category, but still not 100% certain. Everything Grows can go by without leaving a single impression if played soft, while doing something else. In that case there's nothing much that captures attention, demanding it as it were. Play louder, give it the time of day and details start coming forward that draw me into the songs.

Nagasaki Swim is a band that was drawing attention over the year, without having a new album out. The name kept popping up, but as you can guess the individual songs did not stick with me. Everything Grows amends this. The music can be categorised in the alt.country segment of music. The darker niche of that segment at that. Jasper Boogaart is not the kind of musician shouting his joy from the mountain tops. More the opposite, whispering his misery or simply every day life occurrences in the microphone. In this I hear a strong resemblance with TMGS and the band's singer Peter Lodiers. The two bands could definitely do a tour together.

By turning the album up, the details start coming forward. Some nice horns in some of the songs, e.g. Not the mariachi inspired ones of TMGS but again, the resemblance is there. The strings giving an extra layer to 'Sleep'. Details that easily remain hidden but jump out with more volume. 'Sleep' is even an upbeat song, in its sort. Nagasaki Swim turns up the tempo and the nice additions do the rest.

Everything Grows isn't the band's first, that was 'The Mirror', 2021. An album I totally missed or did not have the time to pay enough attention to. I can't tell you anymore. Everything Grows seemed to become the band's "difficult second" until Boogaard let things sort of go and depend on chance. This worked as by chance nice things started to happen and (elements of) songs fall(ing) into their place.

It all resorts in a warm album that pleases no little. Take a song like 'The Weight (part 2)'. Again, the strings pop up, the backing vocals in the, yes, background. The band that is very present. All together they lift the album as a whole up considerably. Nagasaki Swim scores the jackpot here.

With 'Wait' a modern classical piano piece is presented with some birds in the background from the Yellowstone National Park website. The composition can go straight into Kairos, the Concertzender radio programme. The theme is related to 'The Weight (part 2)', the song totally unrelated to the rest of the album, but obviously works in this context.

Getting into the mood of the album more and more the mood moves from misery to dreamy. Listening more closely changes the mood for me. That is a feat, as far as I can recall, that never happened before. It is deeper level than changing an opinion on an album. The album itself changed with my sentiment.

Concluding, yes, I am glad I put in the effort and truly started listening to Everything Grows. The album deserves it and is another of the nice releases so far into 2023. It is a rich year already.

Wout de Natris

You can listen to and order Everything Grows here:

https://nagasakiswim.bandcamp.com/album/everything-grows