Goodbye sleep-talk through the fog on their single ‘Take Time’
Brighton’s on-the-rise dream-pop newcomers, Goodbye, underscore the importance of atmosphere on ‘Take Time’, a track that simmers as much as it soars.
“I’ve been talking in my sleep,” vocalist Sarah Ryan opens the wilting track, which favours space and disenchantment before blooming into a frustrated, hazy free-fall, followed up by Megan Wheeler’s close-knit harmonies that soon send Ryan’s voice into the stratosphere as the track bursts into shoegaze euphoria.
There is a kind of compartmentalised instrumental competency evident throughout, one that bears the band’s influences close to the surface level.
The ethereality of the Cocteau Twins builds hauntingly into a rockier texture that pads out the disarming disenchantment, with the kind of drippy guitar licks you might hear on a Wolf Alice track, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Turning back to look forward means Goodbye are able to build familiarity with ease. Is the track inviting and introspective? Yes. Is the track all that inventive? I mightn’t agree so quickly, but what it loses in uniqueness it makes up for in atmospheric layering as a means into Goodbye’s warbled world of pull and pull, of inner turmoil and fragmented emotional chaos; it’s all sleep-talk indeed.
Ryan sings in a way that questions the words she is posing as fact, resting upon an inherent semantic instability that adds to the foggy, confused late-at-night inkature of their particular sound. Goodbye, they say, as they beckon us in and abandon us in the mist, and music becomes the question mark within the guessing game of life.
As Ryan explains, “Sceptical that time really does heal all wounds; this track is about patience, forgiving, growing and trusting during hazy times that the dust will settle and skies will clear again”.
In this way, the track is a perfect extension of the world of the no-longer-youthful, as it ruminates on what it means to exist in a time where everything around us is being taken away, and as such, fits into the broader tapestry of their debut EP, titled These Things Take Time, which exists as a “scrapbook of fleeting moments and emotions, amalgamating into one huge looming feeling. Life trickles away so quickly, and sometimes you can look up and realise everything that once surrounded you has completely fallen away”.
With very little to show for themselves, Goodbye have already bagged some impressive support slots for the likes of Lambrini Girls, Mary in the Junkyard, Bdrmm and TTSSFU. ‘Take Time’ might be a track for sleep-talkers, but it’s only a matter of time before the band graduates into the real world, and you best be ready for it.
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