Courtesy of Consequence of Sound.

With the release of Lemonade‰’s Minus Tide, what we encounter is a certain rebirth of Lemonade as a sophisticated pop act. With a broad reduction of the experimental and inexpressible qualities present on Diver (2012), Lemonade has begun to describe itself distinctly by their emotive quality – a movement that, all at once, seeks to disclose its closeness to our emotive lives by reminding of us of all of our fragmented emotional reflection that are oscillating around us. Ones that are made present to us as we seek to describe what we experience within the dreamscape of the album.

If we want to describe what is at work in Minus Tide, we must say that our experience opens onto a very abstract emotive landscape, beginning with the first track ‰Stepping out.‰’ Immediately, we are, at once, transcended out of the particular feeling we might manifest towards it, and instead are moved implicitly towards a more abstract reflection on the work itself.

If Minus Tide is established by our reflections of it as such, whatever these may be, it is then the retotalization of all moments we‰’ve shared with Lemonade. It then becomes clear that it can only be decrypted by all of our previous moments with it as such; that, if it is to have a meaning, it must be able to be imported back into the real and actual experiences we have had already.

This is precisely what is at work when tracks such as “Clearest‰” immediately remind us of “Vivid.‰” This must be understood as meaning the significance – the overall meaning, moreover – that we have when listening to Minus Tide – and those who are not familiar with Lemonade will be invited to begin the process of totalization – is that it continues and extends our experiences with Lemonade indefinitely.

In this respect, Minus Tide functions as a paradoxical threshold of our more general dispositions toward our world that is, by definition, obliquely oriented. For informed listeners, it is not just just a question of conceptualizing what this particular album says about the overall development of the group; it is a question of being present at this particular development, as a movement outward, an encompassing and surpassing of the gaze we had previously soaked their lyrical form with. As we listen, at a certain point, no doubt, the particular sounds and lucid images of “Neptune‰” from Diver merge with the ambivalent sounds of “Water Colored Visions‰” from Minus Tide.

While Lemonade resists the temptation to present us with wholly intelligible or available lyrical content, the moment that we share when listening – the naked ambience, freed from all its visible constraints of large sound designs and psychically discharged lyrical content, strongly embraced as a deeply romantic and emotive quality, punctuated by a longing abyss that is spoken by a hidden saxaphone – presents itself as a romantic correspondence.

Not only does Clendenin gather his emotive voice in silent refrains, signified continually in and by his low-pitched hums; he also gives a positive value to the emotive quality of Lemonade‰’s sound (and even to his previous efforts), it is to the other – as lover, as partner, as youthful bliss – he address himself to.

In Minus Tide, the ambience of Clendenin‰’s voice is in the service of a deepening affection, a certain celebration of the individual, which is unlike the memorable moments in “Neptune,‰” one marked by a default in one‰’s faith in the other.

No longer is it a question of why the removal of the other, as other, is to devastate and reduce one‰’s horizon; rather, the world of Minus Tide is destined to become a moment of dionysian celebration – and not a moment of the destitute.

Already, in “Come Down Softly‰Û the world has grown more flush and whimsical; in “Orchid Bloom,‰Û the world for which Minus Tide has opened up to, extends its hand directly old memories of youth in sunbaked fields and southern farms. Assuming the world that we step into remains essentially a shared world – a world with the other, as other, as lover, as movement, heat clung, and moments lost – we can come to see the promise of Minus Tide fulfilled.