artist: Reuben Hollebon
title: Terminal Nostalgia
label: Bright Antenna
mastered by: Tim Debney
“English musician Reuben Hollebon hasn’t always worn the label of singer-songwriter comfortably. He didn’t even pick up a guitar until he was nearly out of his teens, and then he spent most of his 20s working as a music engineer in London, adding his sonic fingerprint to records by Courtney Barnett, Basement Jaxx, Paul McCarthy, and others. So it’s safe to say that this whole “solo musician” thing is fairly new to Hollebon, though you’d never know it by listening to his debut full-length, Terminal Nostalgia.
The album, which Hollebon self-produced, conjures images of dusky seashores, windswept landscapes, and other locales populated more by thoughts than by other people. Opener “Haystacks” has the same impressionistic feel as Claude Monet’s painting series of the same name, evoking a slippery kind of nostalgia with its narrative of a lost boy caught setting a field on fire. With his acoustic guitar and wavering, crackling voice, Hollebon pulls us into the scene but also keeps us at a distance, as if he’s always withholding the smallest part of the story.“
from Consequence of Sound
