Following the release of his debut EP ‘It’s Only You’ earlier this year, Better Person has revealed a new music video for the track Sentiment. Directed by Mortiz Freudenberg, the collaborators opted for visuals that would to mirror Better Person’s signature stark, emotional and minimal performance, rather than one filled with artifice. As recounted by the director, “We started working on the video for “Sentiment” four months ago. We rented out lighting equipment, set up a studio and worked for days to produce a lot of expensive looking shots. After weeks and weeks of not touching the material we lost our feeling for it. We needed something new. One evening we just biked to a park and shot this one take. It took us 5 minutes and everything seemed just right about it.” Watch the video via YouTube below.
Better Person’s enigmatic stage presence is matched by his elusiveness as a recording artist: while he’s already toured with the wonderful Canadians TOPS and Timber Timbre, and as guitarist/keyboardist for Sean Nicholas Savage, at six tracks ‘It’s Only You’ is his longest release, encompassing the critically acclaimed singles Sentiment and I Wake Up Tired.
While the EP’s sonic touchstones – torch songs, Sade, Arthur Russell, synthed-up European and Japanese pop from the 80s, French and Italian movie soundtracks – are all unimpeachably romantic, there’s a more Romantic undercurrent of isolation that begins from the way ‘It’s Only You’ was made – all recorded on a computer at home. Byczkowski brings to the fore an aspect of the recent embrace of New Romantic soundscapes and R&B emoting: crooning as a form of self-seduction, a kind of therapy, an impossible compromise between the irreconcilable poles of intimacy and isolated self-sufficiency. The title itself casually, elegantly captures the paradoxical phase shift which occurs when the movement toward closeness becomes a plunge into solitude. ‘It’s Only You’ is the sound of turning down the mood lighting so low you’re no longer sure if anyone else is there.
The transmutation of being-alone-with into being-alone ignites a fixation on memory, and most especially on its entanglement with place. On repeated listens, ‘It’s Only You’ slowly reveals itself as an album of (self-imposed) exile behind a facade of seduction. In the aftermath of intimacy, one is left with only sensual remnants – smell leads to memory (“I found a smell that takes me home,” Byczkowski sings in opener Somebody Cares) and memories, of home and of people, lead to the question of place and belonging. In Somebody Cares, “I found a smell that takes me home” leads into “I try to notice all the things around” – reminiscence of there demands attention to here – but he concludes “God only knows where I’m gonna live.” I Wake Up Tired features the plaintive request “Show me a place / where I feel home;” while the refrain in Everything Cold asks the question on the mind of every expatriate in Berlin: “Why is everything closed on Sunday night?” In the still astonishing Sentiment, the singer is left unsure of his identity, with only sentiment remaining, precisely because he will “never be from here.”
For listeners already enamored with Sentiment and I Wake Up Tired, the real revelation of ‘It’s Only You’ may be the closing track Your Smell which, atop a tragicomically funky shuffle, wraps in a cocoon of beautiful confusion all of Byczkowski’s themes: lost love, lost locales, and finding oneself again, fleetingly, provisionally, in their pursuits.
Track listing:
1. Somebody Cares
2. Sentiment
3. I Wake Up Tired
4. It’s Only You
5. Everything Cold
6. Your Smell
