When Ross leans away in his songs - whether in quieting abruptly, breaking a rhyme or refusing the cheap satisfaction of a bridge - it's almost as if he's entreating his listener - like the member of the surgical team he's addressing in the song of the same name - to hold his hand. It's a subtle dance of tension and solicitation. But a few master the art of withholding, and those lean away, inviting the viewer to fill the distance. Scholar and practitioner of transcendental cinema Paul Schrader often describes a certain dichotomy in film: most pictures lean forward, out toward the audience. 'All the blank spots left a mark,' he sings of the neighborhood's asphalt vacancies, and in so doing outlines the subject of the record at large: the heft of emptiness. Instead, from the outset, amid the fluttering strings, Ross presents a gentle request to the listener - to be patient, to demonstrate grace not demanded by the lacquered radio hits vying for their clicks. Opener 'Cahooting the Multiverse' billows outward on the wings of horns, expanding synths ruminative and gentle, evoking the muted digitization of early Broken Social Scene, Ross begins with a montage that slinks around his subdivision like roll-credits.

Rich with these tiny embellishments, ILYSM is a renaissance tapestry the threads cohere from a gallery distance, but reward the most microscopic examinations.

In sun-slanted motes of dust, Wild Pink found entire worlds.Ī split-second tone cues in the new record like a pitch pipe, a staccato hum one might miss if they weren't searching for it. This focus culminates on ILYSM ('I love you so much'), the band's fourth studio album, which functions as an ark, freighted with 'everything I thought was important but isn't anymore after the year I went through,' as Ross explains on its final track. He turned his eye to what remained around him, familiar places lit anew. Six months after he started writing the follow-up to last year's heartland-windswept A Billion Little Lights, Ross was diagnosed with cancer. In his own way, frontman John Ross of Wild Pink gravitates toward these same prologues and epilogues to action, widening the aperture on minutiae only meaningful to a person forced to confront the preciousness and precarity of being alive. Resist conventional cuts to reveal what emerges in the dead air keep the tape and mind rolling. The term 'slow cinema' - of which Tarkovsky's work is foundational - has by now been diffused by overuse, but what remains consistent among its varied incarnations is a demand for patience. The Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky reportedly once said he made his famously glacial masterpiece Stalker slow at the start to give certain people time to leave the theater.

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