Westerman – ‘An Inbuilt Fault’ album review
Three years after releasing his debut album, Your Hero Is Not Dead, British-born indie artist Westerman has returned with his latest LP, An Inbuilt Fault. Another remnant of the Covid-19 lockdown period, the heady ambient electro-pop sounds on the album immediately remind you of how it feels to have nothing but time and opportunity. Westerman takes every opportunity to throw you on a rollercoaster of genres.
The spacey open nature of ambient music comes through first on ‘Give’. From there, everything from embracing the best sides of acoustic, folk, and orchestral music on ‘Idol: RE-run’ to the monk chants of ‘Take’ and the upbeat twitch of ‘A Lens Turning’ feels like a deliberate left turn from whatever came before it. One would think that a consistent set of left turns would eventually bring you back to where it all began, but that’s not the path that Westerman is here to take you on.
The musical landscape suddenly runs ice cold on ‘I, Catullus’. Acoustic instruments sound like samples, and electronic percussion sound like they could be live bongos. At the centre of it all is Westerman’s voice, the only thing that seems to be unaffected by the constantly evolving composition. Holding back the groove for a full minute is a gutsy move for a song like ‘Help Didn’t Help At All’, but if there’s one thing that An Inbuilt Fault never worries about, it’s hurrying to any of its songs’ conclusions.
‘CSI: Petrlona proves to be the album’s most important Rorschach test. Some listeners will hear an intoxicating electro-folk painting that lets its lyrics float into whatever shapes they may take. It’s the closest that Westerman himself ever gets to truly letting you see what’s going behind the curtain, but when the sound wobbles in and out of tune two-thirds of the way through, your patience could very well be put to the test. Is it deliberately trying to catch your ear, and after a full song of easy processing, does this little bit of a challenge make the music more or less enjoyable?
When it’s openly wondered whether this is “an end without beginning” in ‘Pilot Was a Dancer’, the album lets you decide for yourself. At its most impressive, the album keeps you guessing with every twist and turn, creating a long and diverse tapestry behind it. Getting locked into its journey might turn out to be a full-album ask.
The honest truth is that the wildly disparate instrument combinations often left me cold. The old-school synth line that worms its way into the raga-folk of ‘CSI: Petralona’ and the hazy tumble of different instruments in the album’s title song are some of the most confounding moments. If you need a particularly obvious throughline in order to enjoy a song, then you might want to get off the Westerman train at this stop.
What An Inbuilt Fault lacks in coherence, it more than makes up for in abstract beauty. Refusing to let anything be too straightforward is a wonderfully combative space to take in music – it definitely provokes the strongest reactions in people. Even if you don’t really “get” An Inbuilt Fault (and I myself admit to not fully getting it), there’s nothing particularly grating or lazy in the album’s construction. Everything feels purposeful, even if that means purposefully erratic.
But just when Westerman threatens to get too far out, he pulls things back in with relatively straightforward indie pop gems. That orange mush (?) from ‘CSI: Petralona’ might not be much to write home about, but An Inbuilt Fault certainly is. At the very least, it’s just as accomplished as the singer’s first album, making An Inbuilt Fault an undeniable success.
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