Album Premiere & Review: Papir, 7
[Click play above to stream Papir’s 7 in full. Album is out Friday on Stickman Records.]
What if, instead of psychedelia being thought of as a means toward escapism, it could be a way to be present in the moment? To put yourself in existence and thus transform it instead of leaving it behind? Papir‘s latest work, 7, follows behind the Copenhagen trio’s 2021 sidestep Jams (review here) and 2019’s VI (review here) and brings the instrumentalist unit to a particularly soothing place in terms of sound. And it would be easy, given the confused and often terrified state of the world in which it arrives, to think of 7 as a vehicle for the listener to at least close their eyes and imagine something else, some version of the escapism noted above, whatever it may be. But across the four extended tracks — the first of which is the longest (immediate points) with “7.1 (Part I-III)” at 19:52, more than 10 minutes longer than anything else — guitarist Nicklas Sørensen, bassist Christian Becher Clausen and drummer Christoffer Brøchmann Christensen could just as easily be looking for a way to exist in the present moment as to leave it behind. Mindfulness as manifest through psychedelic exploration of sound.
I don’t know that that’s the case and I don’t know that it isn’t. Papir‘s trajectory has grown mellower and more informed by post-rock with time — Sørensen‘s guitar taking on various jazzy impulses here with a gentle feel even as the album’s most active, which is unquestionably the second cut, “7.2” — and even the language one might use to describe their tonality, whether the depth of Clausen‘s bass or the drift in the lead guitar notes, the ethereality of the keyboard lines that emerge after two minutes into the track’s total 6:17, all conjures visions of something other than the reality of a band in a room, creating it, or a listener in a room (or wherever), hearing it. I’m not meaning to argue against psychedelia or heavy psychedelia — and Papir have largely left the pressure to be heavy behind them at this point; they’re no worse off for it — as a transformative experience. It can change you, and it can put you someplace other than where you started out, figuratively or literally. But with 7, I find I’m just as much drawn into the course of the record, from the first graceful awakening of “7.1” to Christensen‘s tom work some six minutes in and the longform drone that ensues over the final two of the piece’s three parts, and it’s as much evocative of itself as of any other atmosphere I might want to put it to.
Perhaps ‘grace’ is the defining feature throughout 7. If one thinks of it in the religious context, the sudden act of being ‘saved,’ then there’s another layer entirely to appreciate along with the smooth fluidity of the material throughout the album, but again, it doesn’t have to be one or the other. 7 is never brash, Papir never tip into the bombastic even as much as they did on Jams, and it doesn’t lose its sense of flow when “7.2” brings the drums in after a long absence in the ending sections of “7.1 (Part I-III)” and bids them farewell once more for the eight-minute “7.3” only to have far-off toms punctuate “7.4” in a shifted priority from the ready hi-hat of the opener.
The material throughout is uniformly gorgeous and spontaneous feeling, but each piece has its own life and its own impression to make within the overarching serenity of the whole, whether it’s “7.1 (Part I-III)” seeming to let go as it transitions from its first movement into the second and more synth-driven third, the regrounding effect of “7.2” after all that spaciousness has been cast — a soft, pastoralist jam with keyboard layered over, resulting in a vibrant wash of melody — the seeming standalone-guitar minimalism that builds upward in “7.3” and the long and winding echoes of “7.4” that are all the more resonant for the reaches they leave open, unpopulated.
Take a deep breath. In through your nose, out through your mouth. I’m not going to sit here on my couch in front of my laptop, needing a shower, coffee on my breath — present in my moment, for better and worse — and tell you how to listen to Papir‘s 7. Or that, if you want to put your headphones on and use Sørensen‘s weaving drones on “7.3” as a means to divorce yourself from whatever negativity, baggage or tumult you’re living through either on a micro or macro level, that you’re wrong to do so. Shit, I don’t know. You might’ve got the plague. These are traumatic, uncertain times. But to me, the comfort bring offered by Papir doesn’t seem to forget that, or to ignore it. Maybe I’m reading into the proceedings — scratch that, I definitely am — but the creativity so much on display throughout 7, and even the chemistry between the members of the band, the sense of arrangement and subtlety they bring to one track and then another is empathetic more than escapist. They’re here too.
While I’m establishing a great list of things I don’t know — there are so many! — I also don’t know when these tracks were recorded. Maybe it was three years ago, maybe it was in the height of pandemic lockdown. What matters more in the end are the feelings they elicit in the audience now that they’re seeing release, and the fact that they seem to offer a place to be that isn’t separate from the world around so much as working to reshape that into something more quiescent. It’s not about numbing out, but about being there for each other and coming to a kind of aural understanding even just of yourself and your place amid all the chaos. What is it that they’re ultimately saying? I don’t know; there are no words. Maybe it’s okay not to know, and to just be, without knowing. What if the argument Papir are making with these songs is a case for the world that is as much as a world that could be? What if the letting go and the escape are a distraction and the thing to do is hold on tighter to right now because it and each other are all we have and so much is lost so easily?
