Not many of us, except perhaps billionaires with hilltop Ibizan villas and a medicine cabinet full of top-secret coronavirus cures, will be heading off to the Mediterranean this summer. Sigh.… But Phil Mison, who’s been one of London’s foremost practitioners of all thing Balearic since sitting at the right hand of Jose Padilla in the early ’90s, is here to help via the warm-weather cadences of his new ‘Into Daylight,’ his fourth proper album under the Cantoma moniker. It likely won’t completely ease the pain of a lost season—but it’ll certainly help.
Mison hasn’t radically altered his modus operandi since his early ’00s debut as Cantoma. Lilting acoustic guitars, understated hand percussion and subtle world-music allusions, along with a generally placid vibe and easygoing flow—they’re all still here. But the songwriting seems more self-assured, and the arrangements and instrumentation feel a bit richer—the lush strings, horns and flute of ‘A Night at Après Midi,’ for instance, and the swooning melody and spoken-word interlude of ‘The Mountain’ are the kinds of touches that breath life into the to the tracks.
Mison’s never been vocal-averse, but with ‘Into Daylight,’ there’s a newfound emphasis on the human voice—at times, the sweetly pastoral harmonies that run throughout the album could almost be from a fantasy version of a Laurel Canyon hippie-pop group. (A late-’60s SoCal vibe languidly occasionally wends its way through the album’s Balearica.) The delicate harmonies on the dreamy ‘Space for Us,’ courtesy of Suad Khalifa, find a velvety bed in the tune’s lighter-than-air two-chord vamp, while the jaunty ‘Another Place’ is punctuated by an array of exotica-esque oohs and ahhs. But the vocals aren’t merely decorative: Frequent collaborator Quinn Lamont Luke manages to convey both yearning and bliss on the gorgeous album opener ‘Back in Daylight’ via lyrics like ‘We will find the divine is alive / in every lovers smile / stars align, time is blind, we recline / if only for a while.’
Like most of Cantoma’s discography, the album pulls off the trick of feeling both introspective and communal, the kind of record that would work just as well while solitarily contemplating life’s great mysteries as it would when sharing some Sunday-afternoon mojitos with a few of your best friends. That feat isn’t unique to Cantoma, of course—it’s just one of the countless things that generally makes music so wondrous to begin with. But few producers pull it off as well as Mison does. It’s the kind of sound that makes you feel good to be alive, and we sure could all use a bit more of that right now.
Cantoma's 'Into Daylight' is available now on Bandcamp in both digital and also as a limited run of hand-numbered gatefold (thats double) vinyl.
