Pem – ‘Cloud Work’ EP review: An astonishingly beautiful exploration of connection and grief
There are some voices that silence a room or silence the room inside you, so, for a few moments, there is nothing but listening. All the voices in your head shut up as if hushing to a respectful quiet for the beauty floating in through your ears. Pem has one of those voices, and when paired with lyrics that more than match up to the standard, Cloud Work becomes one of the most stunning releases of the year so far.
It’s a voice that feels hard to define or pin down. It’s soft and angelic but pushed through with a clear power. It’s then coloured with this incredible quiver that seems to punctuate every emotion, grounding it into something visceral while still remaining utterly ethereal. It’s the sort of voice that could sing an alphabetised shopping list and still sound hypnotic by the time you got down to Zoflora.
But the beauty of Pem’s voice is only the surface of the project. Her vocals dance over her words like light on an ocean: moving, glimmering, and beautiful, but with miles more below and miles of big sky rumination above. The intimacy of the EP then feels like a living thing, like Pem attempting to grapple with the huge scale of grief and the various crashing waves, storming clouds, or blue skies of love and loss. As it exists as little more than simply her voice, pianos and guitars, there’s a sense of the artist standing alone amidst the forces of these feelings, trying to capture small details for a sense of control.
Throughout the EP, images of birds and the sea come in and out as the visions are assigned to the memory of her late father and her first moment of looking out of the window and seeing the sky in the minutes after he passed. Her dealings with grief across the project, which was written in the immediate aftermath of the loss, is a beautiful attempt to align the deeply personal and intimate experience of a close death with the grand scale of nature or a connection in the cycles of the natural world. On ‘Gulls’, field sounds of bird calls and boats on the ocean join her voice as she quite literally turns the world around her into a backing band as if to try and remind herself that amid the untethering experience of grief, she is, in fact, here and tied into some grand scheme.
That sense of attempted connection is the ribbon that weaves Cloud Work together. Whether dealing with an attempt to reach out and build a new life in a new city on ‘Awe’ or grappling with the souring and horrific connection between a victim and their assailant on ‘Gut Health’, her lyricism navigates the tricky topic of attachments with such beautiful specificity and nuance. Even as she fills the EP with a series of very personal images, each one is codified with a relatable feeling as a reminder that no matter how disassociated or lost a person can feel, they’re always part of something bigger.
That feeling comes to a head-on ‘Grips’, a standout amidst an EP where every song could be defined as such. “I am sure that I am going to lose you / Somewhere between the tightening of my grip,” Pem sings, perfectly articulating a desire for connection that’s merged with the fear that holding on too hard, or really loving anything, will only lead to loss. The movement between these observations and the returning images of the final moments spent with her father or the quiet isolation experienced after his death somehow feels like a full circle of life.
Cloud Work manages to grapple with the massive, unending topic of love and loss with such sharpness, tenderness and consideration, all performed so stunningly it could bring a tear to the eye and channelled through a musicality that only ever comes from pure talent. All five tracks are flawless, holding a beauty so grand that all you can do is stay quiet and let the feelings surround you like the air, the sky or the sea, with the reminder that every emotion is part of nature, too.
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