Charmed and relaxed in equal measure, the beauty of SYML is the surface of simplicity. Below this is a nest of instrumental wonder and complexities well beyond the grasp – and these songs without words, as though writing the movements of dance – give How I Got Home its foundation. Following up on his attempt to find beauty in morbid inevitabilities on The Day My Father Died, Brian Fennell squares up the rest of his reflections on a neat EP package. Opener Sentimental is the right word to describe this one. How I Got Home is a nostalgic and tender care package delivered to those who need to place rose-tinted glasses over their eyes for just a few moments. There is comfort in parts of the past – SYML acknowledges this through these instrumental pieces.
There is a chamber pop-like feel to opener Sentimental, the broad flourishes and isolated piano as those strings ebb away and out of earshot gives SYML a confident opener. In taking the approach to soft instrumentals, SYML has the chance to open his listeners to the calming tones in which he finds comfort. This chance is not taken. All of Us skims on by without so much as a stretch of interest and the sombre piano strokes on Breathtaker, as personable as they may be for How I Got Home, sound akin to the supermarket advertisements which flood the television screens around Christmas. As it turns out, the heart can sound tired and tonally indifferent – a shame too since Sentimental opens with all the necessary potential for a release such as this.
Still, there is hope as Girvan stokes the flames of something passionate, those little sweeteners and touches of hope found within are the assured flourishes SYML shows so often in his other works. Barely audible piano ballads come for the heart and the soul, and it is up to How I Got Home to not only target your feelings but extract them with enough intact to develop them and attach them to SYML and his experiences. Girvan is the best of the bunch, and there is either a whistling underneath those touches of piano or there is a crack in the window behind the desk. After hearing it again on title track How I Got Home it is clear the storms within the East Riding of Yorkshire are making a mess.
SYML hopes to make a mess too. Of his listeners, not of this standards-filled EP. Piano flourishes and a trickling, weaving effect are not quite enough to present an emotional overhaul but the intent and sentiment feel genuine. It most certainly and assuredly is. Though it may be the case for SYML putting his heart on the line, it feels as though these are the unformed dregs and as he mounts a return to this golden form at the end of How I Got Home, the inarticulate instrumentals found earlier on this piece sink any chance of finer quality. A seventeen-minute reset for those who need a bit of background noise. Make no mistake, those days of quiet and reflective pieces are well needed – but they can and are better than this should you look hard enough.
