Contretemps

Album: Time Will Die And Love Will Bury It (2018)
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Songfacts®:

  • Rolo Tomassi synth player James Spence told The Independent about this propulsive epic.

    "We struggled for so long to get the intro to that right. I wanted to challenge myself to write an ascending pattern that feels like a plane taking off, something with a constant sense of motion.

    There's a couple of tracks that I feel do it really well, one of which was 'All Yours' by Submotion Orchestra. It used to be a regular on the playlist at the restaurant I work at and I absolutely loved it. I sat down and learnt how to play it and worked out that the trick was simply to have an ascending pattern that added an extra chord each time it's played. We've never really done something like that before and I think when we wrote 'Contretemps,' we had festival crowds in mind.

    There's this huge melodic tension building before reaching a point where it just explodes. That's probably the one I'm looking forward to playing most live."

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