Andrew Bayer ft. Alison May – Immortal Lover

Trance-ending from one lifetime to the next…

[Video][Website]
[7.17]Will Adams: Trance is either derided or celebrated for its unabashed euphoria, the way its lyrics reach straight for cliché without a hint of cynicism. What’s often left unsaid is how often these songs, despite their accelerated tempos and skyscraping synths, can be devastating. Invariably, the artists who understand this distinction are the ones I gravitate toward, and Andrew Bayer is at the top. “Immortal Lover” has its trance remix, but the downtempo original cuts deeper. The formula is the same, where sharp, clipped beats give way to gauzy thickets of synth, but the differences are crucial. The foundation is a lone pulse, somewhere between an EKG reading and a ticking clock, while the climax sounds like the crushing wave of mortality. By the end, all that’s left are Alison May’s vocals drifting away like vapors, as if still clinging to life before crossing over. It’s that contemplation of the uncertainty of the afterlife — and what’s left when we’re gone — that leaves the same brutal impression as its forbears.
[9]

Iain Mew: It moves with the unhurried languidness of someone with eternity on their side, which isn’t great for its dramatic effect, but it sounds phenomenal. The itchy bass buzzing its irregular denials would be the highlight of most songs, but here it’s just playing support to the synth radar pings from the other side.
[7]

Alfred Soto: The garish synths and Alison May’s chalky tones would have been poignant if she had sung in, say, Swedish or Spanish, and her outro exhalations are well-timed despite the song’s length.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: Stunning, drawn-out, exquisitely tense verses, recalling the best of Mezzanine and clearly building to a [10] — then whoosh, wet tissue paper of a chorus, which I guess is supposed to be “ethereal” but smothers every bit of drama dead. “Ah, but there’s probably kind of explosive trance remix,” you might think. No, there’s just this, the right idea executed wrong. The verses are cut short and made conventional (1:10 might work, several minutes after the original intro), the damp nothing chorus is still there, multiple times, and the payoff is just another thwonking drop and mediocre rave synths, reaching the heights of a low ceiling. What a colossal disappointment — but hey, we’ve got 22 years left of the world. Surely some independent remixer who knows how the fuck a climax works will excavate the masterpiece.
[6]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Not completely on board with how the vocals are mixed during the chorus, but this is otherwise a perfectly fine bit of electronic pop that puts a bit too much stock in its overarching ambience. All the delay, reverb, dreamy vocalizing, and percussive elements would be easier to stomach if they weren’t all in service of a corny lyrical premise.
[5]

Ian Mathers: Direct song comparisons are always on some level reductive, but when something new that you love triggers a strong visceral link to things you already love, they’re also powerfully appealing. Conceptually, emotionally, and sonically, “Immortal Lover” feels to me like it lives in the space somewhere between Phantom/Ghost’s “Perfect Lovers” (which always makes me think of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled (Perfect Lovers)” piece, so that’s part of the association for me) and Massive Attack’s “The Spoils” (and again more specifically, the song in addition to its video). If you’re already me, that combination spells out more precisely and powerfully than I could hope to in words why and how “Immortal Lover” hits me so strongly; hopefully it translates outside of my head too, at least a little.
[9]