‘Time Is a Healer’: Insecure Men capture redemption in all its bright lights and fraught unease
It’s a remarkable little trick, but once again, Insecure Men have wrestled their arm into the dank malaise and uncovered pearls of beauty lying in wait for those who haven’t yet succumbed totally to jaded misanthropy.
It’s been a tough chapter for frontman and on-off Fat White Family guitarist Saul Adamczewski. Enduring a bout of psychosis and drug addiction last year, upcoming album A Man For All Seasons has corralled members across Warmduscher, Primal Scream, and Mozart Estate, which appears, in Insecure Men’s idiosyncratic fashion at least, to set their principal songwriter on the straight and narrow.
Such renewed confidence glows on A Man For All Seasons’ kitschy cover. Dwelling in the socialist realist theme of their eponymous debut, the sophomore LP out early next month sports Adamczewski in full paramilitary garb flanked by a troop of guerrillas on top of a tank. Yet, the flag waved behind them appears to be the universal white flag of surrender.
It’s this curious clash that permeates over new single ‘Time Is a Healer’. Following last month’s ‘Alien’, Insecure Men’s latest unveils A Man For All Seasons’ plume of fraught trepidation that still hangs in the air of creative renewal. Such tentative frisson crackles with subtle drama gloriously, Adamczewski spinning a phantasmic lounge number, leaden with his and Sleaze’s Dave Ashby’s heavy hearts.
Crooning wounded confessionals of “I wasted so much time thinking I’m alright “, Adamczewski coats his ruminative skulks with a brittle soul shroud, cathartic in its splintered energy but never hiding behind the post-punk grit to stave off accusations of earnestness. Each brass bleat and haunted key swirl with melodic spike, ebbing and flowing together like a grey slice of exotica reverie fuelled by utmost sincerity.
“I would say it’s the best white soul song anyone has written since Mick Hucknall,” Adamczewski wryly states on his blue-eyed number. Commenting on its recording gestation, the Insecure Men singer further remarked, “…we need to make this like Al Green. We had both had our hearts broken and it was wallowing in that thing”.
Wallowing ‘Time Is a Healer’ most certainly does, but never as a draining slog or listless self-indulgence. Adamczewski and the gang have dreamed up a glittering gem of pained, spectral R&B that twirls a weird line between celestial and mundane, a captivating peek into what’s looking like a second LP scoring redemption amid the contemporary malaise.
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