A whirlpool of dream-like melody washes over you in the latest Stephen Steinbrink single ‘Building Machines’. The track bends but doesn’t break, swaying with hypnotic guitars – turning, turning, turning.
You can imagine Steinbrink penning the track with a glance out on to an endless highway, roads that appear forever but do enforce change. Perhaps the song’s origin could have been one hook in a rehearsal space, one that is elongated until every corner of it’s tune is explored. Either way, the song acts like a meditation, an unfurling story, that is timid mostly but growls gently when it wants.
‘Building Machines‘, as with the first single ‘Absent Mind‘, teases Steinbrink’s new album ‘Anagrams‘ to be his most full bodied yet. Intimacy is second nature to Steinbrink’s spacey nomadic folk songwriting, but now the fidelity and size of his songs seems larger. Whereas the hiss and walls of his bedroom always seemed to be an extra instrument on ‘Arranged Waves‘ and ‘I Drew A Picture‘, suddenly these cosy aspects are removed and this heartier sound rolls out onto the road effortlessly.
As Steinbrink confesses: “your mugshot flashed on the screen, an awaking dream, so real and full…” – so too does the listener follow suit. Snapped out of our everyday, induced into a song so real and full.