A review of Lived in Ayre, by Brothers Radio
Walking down the street, skipping over cracks in the sidewalk, Lived in Ayre shines through my headphones. I trudge along with my hands in my pockets, thinking about this springtime we are so loving here in Kalamazoo. I think about the birds and the flowers and the silly little things that make life so beautiful and so worth living. For many of us here at The Kosmo, college is coming to an end, and we will be moving on to find new lovers and play new music and do new things with our new found freedom. But we will be taking all of everything about college with us, the confusion, the pain, the love, the ecstasy, and we will need a way to package this all up so we can take it with us and not leave it behind because even the painful moments are the beautiful moments, the ones we need to keep, even if we don’t want to. And maybe this is what the new album from Brothers Radio allows us to do.
Lived in Ayre cover art, by Erica Fink
Lived in Ayre begins with angst, but quickly leaves that behind, moving instead to a sense of searching, of living in the wonder of uncertainty, and then charging into an infectious love of youth. Yet throughout its whole, the album remains by and large restrained, never quite wanting to put it all out there, hinting that there is a story behind the story, that some things are being left unsaid, and that it is best this way. Created over the course of the past four years by Rob Moran and Devin Kerr while attending the University of Michigan, the lyrics of Ayre string together from track to track like meditations on some anonymous love affair that refused to be left behind.
The first four tracks, beginning with “Open Doors” and extending through “Rosy Colors” are saddened flirtation with the more obvious joy of major chords. Moran’s voice is like walking alone downtown, thinking about someone you love who has left you, yet makes you feel happy warmly inside. This noncommittal peace is distorted into the instrumental “Inner Space” as your steps pick up, thinking about this someone, and you begin to sway your arms with fervor, smiling and nodding at the people you pass. Then you think you see her, but she’s not there, but this is OK. You begin to walk again to the acoustic chorus, this time more sure of yourself, with less to fear in life. Knowing that things are going to be OK, you begin to smile again, yet this returns you to the distortion of insanity and aloneness.
There is silence.
Then, slowly and quietly, life begins to go on. A car engine revs up, and you are going someplace new. Only that somebody is still there with you, like a haunting ghost you know to still be alive. She is there, quietly with you. You begin to wake up, she is there, yes, but for the first time, this is OK, this present absence of loving. You begin to become OK, and smile again from deep inside your heart like a little kid with a ball. You leave, you are getting out, going. You don’t know where, but you are going somewhere to get away. Not like you are escaping, not the leaving kind of going, but the finding kind of going, the kind that makes you feel like you are breathing for the first time in your life. This is “Chicago.” This is your happiness, this is your life, you realize, this is something that is beautiful, and what is so beautiful about it is that you have been given the opportunity to care about other people. This is a good feeling, you realize.
Yet again, you retreat into sadness with “Goodbye”. One of the best parts of Ayre is its refusal to really go anywhere, taking small trips here and there only to return to its stated center of peaceful melancholy. This is not a weakness of unwillingness to take risks, but its greatest strength, and what allows the album to speak to so many of us around a time in our life when the answers aren’t given to us, where there are no clear paths, and lovers are lost, never to be seen again. Ayre‘s uncertainty is its license to relevance.
The finale of the album begins with the assertion that this emotional and intellectual frequency it not something to be kept merely to one’s self, a burden only one person at a time can bare, but something that is shared amongst friends and loved ones, regardless of what independence we may like to invoke. “Under Leaves” is as peaceful as it is comforting, an echo of past lonesomeness, while sounding to the deepest joys one is able to experience only through standing by themselves in the middle of an empty room and realizing that they are not alone.
“I Pretend” concludes Lived in Ayre. Like a true love affair, one is left alone with the knowledge that they will never actually get over the love, and that the sole closure one can take is a knowing of peace. “I Pretend,” however, lives in this peace with a flicker of joy usually reserved for new love as opposed to the old. And maybe that’s the point. As we leave a past behind, whether it be college, a love, or a life some place else, why look back on our experience, our wounds, our triumphs with a melancholy glaze? Why not see the exultant joy that existed right along side even our darkest moments if only we had taken the perspective on our situation that would have allowed us to see this second light. Lived in Ayre beacons us towards this path. And then there is silence. And then the album begins again.
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