Color Temperature – Here For It | Album Review
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Developer Records
The human existence is an exercise in perspective. It’s an emotional state just as much as it is a physical one. As you get older, your perspective evolves, and your understanding of yourself and the world around you changes, reaching across temporal gaps to bring memories into fresh view, cast aglow in the light of experience and time.
Color Temperature songs are preoccupied with perspective – especially the eleven tracks on the gorgeous new album Here For It. Ross Page, the one-man brainchild behind Color Temperature, is acutely adept at placing you, the listener, within his memories – seeing the same things, experiencing the same emotions, feeling the same warmth of sunlight or coldness of shadow. Beyond the lyrics, the sound of the record is incredibly experiential. A Color Temperature song has the uncanny ability to flip your perspective on its head, re-orienting you into a new phase of understanding and spatial awareness.
Take “Backdoor,” one of the excellent singles, for example. The song opens with an immediately endearing, bittersweet letter of regret: “I’m so sorry / I hurt you baby / I’d feed you cake I mean / If we had the money.” This is boosted by a rolling, fuzzy bass, the pleasant causticness of the tone ironically underscoring the intimacy. It’s the sound of laying on your bed in an apartment, working to get the words right. But then, the song takes off. The sonic world opens up. Now, it feels as if we’re on a train, watching the world go by. This spontaneous re-orientation makes us feel like we’re viewing the story from above, seeing the grander shapes and patterns of a life that led to this regret. Then, he brings us back to earth. The music shifts from soaring to ominous, sounding so obfuscated, as if we’re hearing the end of the song through several doors. Bringing us back into this apartment room.
Time, revisitation, and shifting perspectives are all baked into the album’s core concept. To explain its structure, Page drew up a map of two concentric loops – a circle within a circle. As a whole, the album can play as a perfect loop, much like Transatlanticism, a record whose long-trailed reverb legacy can be heard throughout Here For It.
The song “Tracy,” which leads to the inner loop of songs, is a gorgeous jog through the late summer golden hour. Page’s softly sung, gain-cranked voice pulls you along with elastic elegance. The instrumentation here calls to mind the best of Sea and Cake – upbeat yet supremely soothing, with tropicália-esque elements intermingling with krautrock-adjacent rhythms. The guitars, recorded direct into computer rather than through amps (a byproduct of his move from Wilmington, NC to the more tightly packed Brooklyn), break up beautifully. Each note seems to barely hold itself together as it splits at the edges and cracks the veneer. But then, the energizing airiness is all sucked away, plunging us into a deep dive through aquatic synths and slowly drifting vocals. Page describes the song as being about reflecting on the past, the heartbreaks and the trials, and being hit with that doubt that asks, “Is that going to happen again?” It serves as the perfect emotional, thematic segue into the inner loop of regret and aged sadness.
The inner loop, bookended by “Old City Pt. I” and “Old City Pt. II,” is a collection of older songs that either felt “too sad” for his previous record or that Page had reworked with a now-shifted perspective. Though, “Old City Pt. II” is one of the most comforting “too sad” songs I’ve heard in quite a while. The harmonized hope for light to “fill the frame again” is a mesmerizing, ghostly refrain that will loop in the mind of the bereaved long after the song fades to an end.
When you exit the inner loop, you find yourself caught in the crystalline web of “Unveiling Decorations,” a show-stopping acoustic gem. The acoustic arrangement lets Page’s subtly masterful guitar layering shine, offering an uplifting respite before diving back into the glimmergaze of “Here For It.” The title track’s uneasy, shimmering guitars give way to rolling arpeggios, playing host to the best couplet of the album: “Shit, life’s just one big lingering ask / Shit, whatever you want, I’m here for it.” The gentle intimacy wraps you up in its sunny-with-shades-of-doom atmosphere.
Then, it all (intentionally) falls apart at the end of “Dusk.” Everything dissolves into an ominous oscillation as if the whole song has been run through a haunted Leslie speaker. It’s the sound of arriving at the end of the cycle, leaving you ready for the loop to restart. It rings with the feeling of looking at a new phase in your life, noticing the echoes of what came before and how they change with this new perspective. Color Temperature encapsulates this delicate sensation in both the record as a whole and within its minutiae, creating a landscape that you’ll find yourself exploring more and more, discovering new beauty and strangeness within the ever-shifting perspectives.
Joshua Sullivan is a writer, filmmaker, and musician based out of Wilmington, NC. Find him on Twitter (not X) at @brotherheavenz and Instagram at @human_giant.
