Album Review: Love And Other Planets by Adem

Adem's heralded Homesongs was a paean to hearth and homestead, and it succeeded in spades by turning the intensely personal into the universal: home as harbor in an anthropological sense, the glue that binds everyone together at the same time it affords us our most intimate moments. On Love and Other Planets, Adem turns the telescope on its end, equating the far reaches of our universe with the space that exists in the closest of quarters -- between lovers, between friends, between our own perceptions and reality. It's another intriguing angle from which to launch a concept record, though Adem's intimate, stand-alone portraits certainly belie any prog-ish stereotypes -- The Wall this ain't.

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Adem Ilhan is a sucker for a concept. Homesongs, his debut collection of cockle-warming laptop folk, centred on the hearth and spawned a cherishable annual festival, Homefires. This time, space is the place. On Launch Yourself, a departing lover is depicted as a fellow astronaut who "left me stranded while you broke through to other worlds", while These Lights Are Meaningful indulges in a spot of philosophical stargazing.

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On his second solo album, Love and Other Planets, Fridge bassist Adem Ilhan turns his gaze towards the stratosphere, looking for messages from another world, seeking sense in celestial motion, and pondering the vastness of the galaxy. While free of any narrative thread or logical progression, Love is at least in some sense a concept album, considering the same themes and evoking the same motifs throughout. Musically, however, it’s considerably less focused: while Adem retains much of the acoustic instrumentation (not to mention a marked fondness for chimes and glockenspiel) of his debut, Homesongs, he seeks to take it in multiple different directions, experimenting with more beat-driven song forms and electronic textures.

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