More painful than the sudden death the soul experiences in the wake of unrequited love and longings left unfulfilled is the frustration of unexpressed feelings and unresolved conflicts which breed bitterness and initiate cycles of sadness. Alternative R&B singer-songwriter Tom Saison’s latest EP, aptly christened For Those That Failed At Love, is what could be best described as a human attempt to remedy these pains and the void in question hungry for love and attention. The Zimbabwean crooner enlisted the help of Keamo as the sole feature of his short work that opts for zephyrous sound selection to dovetail and contrast with Saison’s somberness of soul as expressed in his heavy-hearted lyricism.
For Those That Failed At Love is a four-track R&B and soul EP with song lengths that exhibit curtness only matched by their laconic contents. Produced entirely by Saison himself, the extended play thrives on the uniformity of arid production predicated on a strong reliance of harmonic piano strings to code an ambient atmosphere.
The barren sound scape sets the tone for Saison, who switches between emotional lethargy and hopeless romanticism throughout the project’s ten-minute playback time.
For Those That Failed At Love EP Artwork
Centered around the theme of love, Saison’s execution and dissection of romance as the primary subject matter crafts a fanning effect which gives rise to sub-themes such as unsatisfied yearning, heartache, and disappointment. Whether the songbird is subconsciously pining for love through gratitude on “Who Said” (“I’ll treasure that times we had cause you showed me things I’d never know”), or experiencing the cuts and irreversible regrets of post-breakup clarity as on “Chasin”, Tom maintains his laser-sharp focus when it comes to zeroing in on translating every unseen wound into palpable thoughts and words meant to serve as an anodyne for those with scars still raw and reactive.
Tom Saison’s For Those That Failed At Love might be a brief treatise on heartbreak and love; however, it is a troubled opus that documents the inner struggle and the extrinsic frustration of searching for love one just can’t seem to pinpoint the location of. Saison hardly says much in the record, but it’s the accuracy of his conduct throughout the EP as well as his performances which breathe an air of believability into this offering. Saison does not take great pains to explain what he’s feeling in detail, because the great pain in question is in the detail of his art: the pain is visible in his voice, in his songwriting, and in the habitat of his production.
For Those That Failed At Love is a set of soliloquies meant for the benefit and healing of the listener rather than a collection of navel-gazing monologues that glorify the artist’s own suffering while it gradually saps his strength, dooming him to drown to death in it.
Listen to “Chasin”:
