ALBUM REVIEW: CAREY CLAYTON ‘GRADUALLY, SUDDENLY’
The reality hit in the most brutal way when you open the door of the once shared apartment for the first time. Disrupted by other things, you haven’t had time to process the breakup. The moment you opened the door, the familiarity and strangeness instantly brought back reality—the emptiness attacks like a disease. You can’t stop the feeling of something ripping your heart out. Panic attack arrived in silence; at that moment, you were drowning and suffocated between the swelling walls.
‘Gradually, Suddenly’ was born from a panic attack when Carey Clayton returned to his apartment for the first time after his four-year relationship has ended. “Thought of You” was the initial refusal of reality in an attempt to recapture the warmth before it slips. In the sweet, childlike chimes and dreamlike, surreal texture, we sink into the lake of memories, as if bathing in a perfect glass world, looking through the peephole into the past, disregarding the draining lungs.
Through the shattered light you remembered when you first met. “give it all away” is the crush, the blush, and the first kiss stored in time. Fragile as glasses, in the end, the world decomposes in the burning ashes. Then all that it left was debris. Color has faded, and the world became black and white in “debris.” Wandering aimlessly in numbness, sadness sometimes came to visit in waves.
“How does it help” has the sound of a classic sad song at a different time. The oddly cliché melodies bring forth a moment of realization: the glows from an older time slipped awayunnoticed. We didn’t know what we were missing. Maybe one night, you finally started crying. You started to reflect on everything that led to where you are, wondering what went wrong. In the end, you realized it has really ended, and there was nothing you could do about it.
The feelings finally evoked in the album opener “not of plastic.” The complex feelings crash and collide with each other. In contrast to the coherent, gentle sadness, there was the struggle of repressed, destructive energy. Instead of an explosive release, the built-up faded to its climax and was then channeled into the thriving energy in “underfoot.” The underlying tension reoccurs like tides, yet the destructive force has transformed into something else.
The cycle of life has brought us back to the beginning of “thought of you” with an entirely new experience.