'Brutalist Lullabies' Is Exactly What It Says It Is

There is nothing to decode in the title. 'Brutalist Lullabies' is nine nursery melodies recorded in the concrete parts of a 1968 tower block, and if that sentence makes you tired, I understand. The concept sits about halfway between a design magazine photoshoot and one of those accounts that posts stairwells with the contrast pushed up. I put off playing it for a fortnight.

What saves it took me three listens to hear properly. The building is not the subject. The subject is the ordinary work of loving a place that other people have already decided is ugly, while carrying a two-year-old up eleven flights because the lift is out again, and the building is only the instrument that work is performed on.

Six rooms and a tower

Cass Nowell has lived at Ashgrove Point since 2019. She recorded the album in six of its shared spaces: the drying room, the underground car park, the refuse chute room, the stairwell, the eleventh-floor walkway and the lift lobby, with a portable recorder and, from the sound of it, very little else.

The car park is the star. Two long parallel concrete walls produce a flutter echo, that machine-gun repetition you get when sound bounces between hard surfaces with nothing to stop it, and Nowell uses its repetition rate as a metronome. She claps once at the top of every take in that room and plays to what comes back. It means three tracks share a tempo dictated by the distance between two walls poured in 1968. On 'Drying Room' the only percussion in the song is a tumble dryer finishing its cycle at 1:14, and she waits for it, twice, like a musician waiting for a cue.

The lullaby part is the hard part

Nursery songs are unforgiving material. They have to be simple enough to sing while exhausted and durable enough to survive being sung four hundred times, which is a specification most professional songwriters could not meet. Nowell sings these a fourth or fifth below where they are usually pitched, in the register a tired adult actually uses at three in the morning, and she leaves in the places where she forgets a line and hums through it.

The tension the record lives on is a technical one. A lullaby is close-range music. It is meant to be sung eight inches from an ear, and every recording convention for it involves a near microphone and a small, dry, private sound. Nowell sings hers into decays of four and a half seconds. The intimacy is public. The most private thing a person does gets returned by a shared stairwell in front of whoever else happens to be on it, which is what living in a building like this is like and which no amount of writing about how materials shape a city's sound quite prepares you for hearing.

What it refuses to do

Two obvious records were available here and Nowell made neither. The first is brutalism as villain: sirens, dread pads, a documentary about failed social housing with the vowels of the residents flattened into evidence. The second is brutalism as object of taste, all geometry and awe and a sleeve that looks good on a shelf, in which nobody lives anywhere.

She avoids both by keeping the neighbours audible. Somebody's television is on through most of 'Lift Lobby'. A man says good evening in the middle of a verse and she says it back without stopping. The child appears exactly once, on the last track, and says something entirely mundane about a bird on the railing. No symbol, no swelling strings, no moment. It is a decision that would have been very easy to get wrong, and getting it right is most of why this album works.

Where it wobbles

'Chute' is a wonderful sound and a thin idea, three minutes of resonance with a melody hovering nearby, and the middle of the record puts two tracks of similar tempo in similar rooms back to back where a sequencing change would have fixed it. The sleeve notes also lean harder on the architect's name than any of the music does, which reads like a hedge, as if the record were not confident it could hold your attention without a citation.

It can. What it holds you with is the thing every record made in a real place has to earn: the sense that the reverb is not a setting but a fact about somewhere, and that somewhere has a lease, a maintenance backlog and a regeneration ballot scheduled for next year. Ashgrove Point may not be standing in a decade. Dario Fontaine argued in this magazine a few weeks ago that your favourite song is usually a room, and this is nine songs about a room full of people who did not choose the acoustics and made something worth keeping in them anyway.