Music Existence Because of Music, We Exist
When we encounter Neil Nathan in the music video for his new single “Be Still My Ever Beaten Heart,” there’s something rather dark about the setting – and the lighting of the backdrop behind his is only accounting for half of the shadow.
URL: https://www.neilnathan.com/
Nathan is casting something much darker across the imagery in this piece than surface-level visuals can source, and it all starts with the way he sews the words into the fabric of the melody here – slowly, but with the kind of urgency in his vocal that makes it known just how important what he has to say in this track is.
In the instrumental portion of “Be Still My Ever Beaten Heart,” Nathan is a bit more approachable than he is as a singer alone, which has typically been the opposite when he’s recorded new music in the past. This is just a bit more immersive, just a tad more inviting in terms of its physicality compared to what I came into this review thinking I was going to hear, but it nonetheless works well for the sort of narrative that my man is trying to create through much more than his words by themselves.
Although there are some old school hipster vibes in the aesthetical construct of “Be Still My Ever Beaten Heart,” you don’t have to worry about running into another throwback track in this latest release to bear the Neil Nathan moniker in the byline. On the contrary, I think this might be the most in-the-moment kind of track Nathan has recorded since coming under the spotlight with a number of interesting compositions in the past year alone. He’s speaking from the now, and as a singer/songwriter in 2022, that’s actually been proven one of the harder angles from which to communicate almost anything.
Ava Archuleta
