Some say Rahm sits between James Blake, Bon Iver and The Weekend. The first offering of this upcoming journey is a tentative piano something, with beats smoothing around his voice. It feels like the song that comes on after you forgot about the record you played half an hour ago. The needle is still feeling the groove in the vinyl and suddenly you hear music again. You only become aware of the silence now that it's gone, a hidden track, here it is and it is quenching a thirst you didn't know you had.
"tree in a sidewalk" is a paean to the powers of not feeling horrible, even if things are kind of horrible. “What can ya do with all those thoughts?” questions the singer in its opening moments. The answer, his latest suggests, is to let them in.
“I’ll admit it’s easy to hate the world. I do it often — see everything that’s just 100% totally fucked and whimper and snivel and howl my little privileged white face off. For a long time I thought this was the only rational way to exist. But as it turns out, you can look at something like a pitiful little elm, planted in a rusty meagre old sidewalk grill in a vast useless parking lot of some empty Party City in middle America, and not think to yourself how horrible everything is. Can you imagine?” says Rahm. “I had a conversation with a very special someone who thought differently and this is about that conversation.”
Lush and slick, but with the human touches left in (“The first little line was sung into my computer mic, which is why it's got that inimitable Milwaukee food court computer fan realness,” he jokes), ‘Tree In A Sidewalk’ shows an artist adept at finding softness in a digital form and employing the result to tender, goosebump-inducing effect.