"Bittersweet" by Permanent Daylight

My main aim with my reviews is to recommend great music to you as early as possible so you can get to hear it yourselves as soon as it is available. That objective I meet quite often but not always. Sometimes I arrive late at a party and have to hold my hands up: though I must also express at this point my thanks to so many of you who point me towards artists whose music I hadn't previously encountered. A high proportion of my reviews & shares now come from your recommendations.

That said, it really is last call for any review of the current Permanent Daylight  single "Bittersweet" before it can no longer be called their current one.

Sorry: I have no wonderful excuse as several people had indeed steered me towards the band with high praise. As you'll see below, they are already booked in for one of our "Hot Music Live" shows. To make my failure worse, it has been on my personal in car mixtape for some time now. My feeble explanation is that I felt the moment had passed, but that is insufficiently respectful to a great (and highly popular) band and a wonderful song.

Faith (lead vocals & bass guitar), Mollie (drums) and Joseph (guitar) provide a fine example of why you really do not need large ensembles to create the most moving of music: in fact I'd argue that material like this gain much from the space that a trio builds into their arrangements. You will all know from my mentioning it far too often how I rate artists who factor what they don't play into tracks as much as what they do play, but it's worth saying again as Permanent Daylight clearly possess the tastefulness of restraint. I think it's another indicator of why some artists get reviewed by me & others not so.

If you don't mind, I'll digress a little first. One of (in my mind) the most haunting of songs by one of my favourite bands The Undertones was called "Bittersweet" and for some bizarre reason they never released it at the time. It's come out since in re-release extra track form and is a live favourite (as well it might be) so in my subconscious, when I saw Permanent Daylight's song title I was already primed to check it out and to enjoy it.

The two songs don't share much apart from the title and the sense of melancholy the subject engenders (you are not going to write anything else from that starting point are you?). However it says much of the one under current review that it's up there in my estimation & personal response already alongside the one by an internationally renowned band which I've known for far longer. An oblique measure of its worth perhaps, but I also think this side anecdote signals my feelings about it.

It's an intensely affective song which as I have said, the delicacy of arrangement and performance bring out nuanced and thoughtful lyrics. If restraint is one of the key criteria for me then honesty is another (it possibly is even more important) and you do not come across as a truthful performer unless you express verities which even if they are shared (and universality of application is so important in engaging with audiences) nonetheless you articulate not only in a way which sounds like you mean what you're singing about, but in expressions which are fresh & not necessarily the way we've processed them ourselves already. And of course deploying cliches is death to truth.

This is a song I can (and do) listen to without getting tired of it: if you've not heard it yet, please check it out before it is superseded by anything new (which I'm sure is going to be superb given this precedent). It is deserving of much attention and I should have told you so earlier. I'd say "better late than never" but having literally just condemned cliches, that would be very hypocritical of me.

On Friday 20^th June Permanent Daylight join Monastery, Gutter Puppy and King of the Alps at the next "Hot Music Live Presents" fundraiser for The Tin.

 https://www.ticketweb.uk/event/hot-music-live-presents-monastery-the-tin-at-the-coal-tickets/14371523