‘How could I save it for the morning after / some kind of antimatter,’ Sandro Perri softly intones as his latest record draws to a close, his poised, unaffected deliverybestowing a gravity upon what seems in isolation to be a faintly absurd couplet. In fact, Impossible Spaces is an album saturated with‘anti-matter’; the loose compositions that make up the Toronto artist’s second full-length under his own name are anchored by an acute awareness of the importance of negative space in music.
Throughout the album, Perri’s own guitars, analogue synths and modest yet striking tenor are embellished with flourishes of flutes, strings and horns, but nowhere does he allow the ornate arrangements to overflow into gratuitous sentimentality. The wide array of instruments is used instead to colour Perri’s meandering, often elusive, vocal melodies with subtle organic textures and hints of tropicália, giving the music an intangible, breathy quality that is at once both lush and generously spacious. Sandro Perri withholds a lot from his audience. Both emotionally guarded and musically understated, Impossible Spaces can seem vaguely inconsequential when approaching it for the first time but it is in its reserved nature that the album holds its irresistible allure.There is a sense of incompleteness running through Perri’s music – melodies turn unexpectedly, or trail off completely, and moments of catharsis are completely avoided, even when threatened numerous times on the album’s centrepiece ‘Wolfman’ – surrounding the record in an intoxicating air of mystique defying full comprehension.
Impossible Spaces’ existence is a precarious one, its unassuming nature kept from slipping into insipidity only by Perri’s canny appreciation of restraint; the plodding, metronomic percussion and clunky construction of ‘Futureactive Kid (Part 1)’ provides a glimpse of how the album could have turned out had he not performed this balancing act with such dexterity elsewhere. For the most part however, Impossible Spaces is a complex album betraying a sophisticated artistic vision and what initially appears to be a polite, mild-mannered set of mid-paced folk songs slowly unfolds to reveal an endlessly engaging and subtly nuanced work.
