Album Review: The Same Moon

“Let the light soak into your bones”.

The Same Moon, is the new studio album from Wellington poet and songwriter Tom Kane, performing as No Mans Heath, and it does exactly this. Soaks light into your bones.

Tom Kane has a voice that has always struck me as effortless, and I know from having had the pleasure of seeing him play live a few times now, his on-stage presence is as effortless. He commands an authentic sometimes endearingly awkward ease. There’s an ease also to the intricate, weaving melodies of his finger-picking guitar style that drive and shift from dreams to dark alleys, in this collection of poetic ballads and folk songs for the soul.

There’s a great honesty here, both in the music and in Tom’s bio, describing his story of the album, as one of belonging, longing and healing. The opening track, Craving For Home, lulls and sways, inviting you in, prefiguring these themes and the vulnerability with which Tom’s music and poetry is imbued.

The album’s production boasts an unadorned clarity. Recorded live at home then mixed in a collaborative process with engineer Scott Roy, the result is as warm and unpretentious as if I were sitting in a friends lounge listening to someone playing from the relaxed comfort of their couch. The textures of a home recording add a kind of romantic indulgement. Bird song and creaking chairs, shuffling fabric and breath of the bard himself, lend both a familiarity and a fragility.

The songs feel like living things, you can almost hear the hint of a smile or eyes closing in recollection of a sweet moment during Batman Mask. While track 3, Keep Your Hopes In The Middle, delivers a spooky performative melancholy, with a dash of the dark sarcastic humour an Englishman does so well.

In Tell Me Something Good, we are treated to the vocal amplitude of Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo providing the desperate refrain “Oh, don’t deliver my heartbreak” before the tension and relief of The Hush, breaks my heart.

The first album release since Ball of String in 2017, The Same Moon is as full of rich storytelling, and exquisitely played fingerstyle guitar. In Letter From Japan, I’m transported to my own relative memory and affected by ‘Natsukashii’ – the kind of nostalgia that is content rather than regretful, then delivered headfirst into the dark hypnosis of Drones during which I am soon singing along – “I don’t endorse your president”.

There’s a quality of oxymoron, for lack of a better explanation, to Tom’s songwriting that I absolutely love and each track in this collection has this quality. Be it hauntingly innocent, sweetly sorrowful or so very hopeful in its resignation, The Same Moon is a thoughtful and provocative accumulation of very relatable human experiences, in song.

The pure gentle tone of Failing Light, beautifully concludes the story as the final track, Tom’s soothing voice sustaining that honesty to the final line, which is just divine; “We are spinning plates, life’s just to fraught to contemplate. If death was at my door [I would call you up, invite you to stroll with me, in the failing light”.

A beautiful album from a talented artist we are lucky to have in our midst.

No Man’s Heath celebrates the release of their album The Same Moon on Thursday September 25th at Vogelmorn Bowling Club with the support of fellow Wellington artists, Scott Pilgrim and Tessa de Lyon.