Colin Stetson – The love it took to leave you

With his distinctive sound on the saxophone, a pulsating and oscillating rush of brass which in epic Odyssean fashion evokes at once the threshing and winnowing of wheat chaff and the inescapable propulsion of waves out at sea, Colin Stetson unveils the title track of his latest album The love it took to leave you. Billed as both his first full-length solo outing since 2017, following the collaboration-heavy swirls and eddies of last year’s When we were that what wept for the sea, and as a sort of narrative prequel to the New History Warfare trilogy which cemented his swashbuckling reputation, the album was recorded over the course of one week in early 2023 at Fonderie Darling, a former metalworks facility in Montreal with a voluminous main room which still maintains its raw architecture of brick, concrete and steel.

Utilising an array of microphones including a dog-collar device attached to his throat and his virtuosic circular breathing technique, Stetson captured the eleven tracks of The love it took to leave you in single takes without overdubs or effects, casting his alto and bass saxophones and contrabass clarinet across the tarred walls and exposed beams of the main gallery with the same amplification which he uses for his live performances, saturating and no doubt unshackling the very foundations of the facility. Characterising the result as his most fully-realised work to date, Stetson says that the title track on solo alto saxophone:

is a love letter to self and to solitude and to tall old trees that sway and creak in the wind and rain.

Stetson is as muscular as he has ever been here, with that essential circular breathing technique in full effect on ‘The Six’ which swaps his churning or scattering impulses for a starkly industrial backdrop and a series of repetitious foghorn blasts. It is difficult to believe that these aren’t layered recordings as a percussive heartbeat and spectral vocals ally with splurging saxophone runs, which might resonate like the sirens from passing emergency vehicles or on ‘The Six’ with its stonking low-end on the bass saxophone, like the kind of warning alarm which blares in the case of a nuclear meltdown up on the big screen. Stetson adds:

One of the first songs I wrote for this record, ‘The Six’ is a vengeful strut. Played on solo bass saxophone, this one’s big and mean with long arms and a toothy grin.

That sentiment and some of the same atmospherics return on the long and punishing eighth track of The love it took to leave you, whose long drones are gradually subsumed by moonlit feral howls and pummelling waves as the clicking of his instrument’s keys also becomes more pronounced. With the density and weight of an anvil, the piece which is titled ‘Strike your forge and grin’ just keeps mauling and walloping, burrowing and funnelling until the sheer act of endurance becomes at least half of the point.

The amplified sonics allow his fingerings to serve as a constant percussive element while the dog-collar microphone catches every arc and sigh of his voice, and although Stetson has the stated aim of rewriting the canon of the bass saxophone, on The love it took to leave you he bolsters that sound through the use of the equally unwieldy contrabass clarinet, which carries the same pitch of B♭.

Yet for as much as he makes the act of playing saxophone seem like a steep physical regimen, Stetson has won his following by elaborating on the substance of his instrument with real emotional heft. The candour of his music and its capacity for wordless storytelling is present once more on The love it took to leave you, as the title track opens with a sense of mounting urgency which through broad-chested moans and siren alarms barely dissipates until the last. He describes last year’s acclaimed album When we were that what wept for the sea as a ‘sunset parable’ to the New History Warfare trilogy and this as a prequel which still colours all of his earlier work, saying that the record bears the aspect of a yet to be published graphic novel, the type of conceit which aids his compositional process.

The fourth track ‘Hollowing’ is a real growl which approximates the deep basslines and breaks of jungle and drum and bass but with an ecstatic aura emphasised by some whooping and hollering. ‘To think we knew from fear’ is a slow march and ‘Malediction’ gleams and flashes through ribbons of light, while ‘Green and grey and fading light’ bears a wider low end, belying its title as the track is the closest The love it took to leave you comes to the blues.

‘Ember’ is especially redolent of When we were that what wept for the sea with its more aerated sound and brisk oscillations, alternately briny and billowing as Stetson glides out over the wine-dark deep. Then the penultimate ‘So say the soaring bullbats’ is all residue, vapours and chemtrails which waft and glow in the night sky as something monstrous rumbles up from the ground beneath. But by the end of The love it took to leave you Stetson seems to have slain any lingering gremlins as ‘Bloodrest’ is a swift gallop, somewhere between a clearing out and a triumphant taking of wing as with wind in his sails the sinewy troubadour seeks fresh pastures.