Reb Fountain – How Love Bends (Fountain Records) 13th Floor Album Review
How Love Bends, the new album by Reb Fountain, is a haunting and immersive exploration of love in all its facets—its beauty, its pain, and its transformative power.
The album feels like a journey through the breadth of human experience, touching on themes of loss, identity, longing, and resilience. With a soundscape that merges art-pop, folk, and rock influences, Fountain crafts an evocative and often hypnotic listening experience. Her key collaborators who have been with her since her from her self titled album Reb Fountain (2020) and IRIS (2021), Dave Khan, (guitar, viola, cello, keys, co-production), Karin Canzek (bass), and Earl Robertson (drums), as well as Simon Gooding (co–production) who was worked with her since 2008’s Holster.
The album opens with Come Down, setting the tone with its spoken-word delivery over a hypnotic snare drum rhythm. The listener is pulled into a story being told in fragments, there are moments of clarity and doubt woven together. The lyrics, “I’m a light, a fire that’ll shine your light, Dance to the tomb to the night,” introduce the motif of light and darkness, a theme that recurs throughout the album.
There is a dreamlike quality to much of How Love Bends. Songs like Ring Ring and Over Joy/ed draw on the echoes of lost love and the struggle to find oneself in the wake of emotional upheaval. Ring Ring captures the melancholy of absence with lyrics like “Figure it out love, seems like we were ghosts back then, I’ve evolved.” The song’s minimalistic arrangement creates a sense of loneliness, and percussive stops and starts, pull the listener closer to the void the lyrics describe.
Fountain’s voice is a guiding force throughout the album. It moves from the deeper, huskier tones of Over Joy/ed to the clear, serene vocals of Nothing Like. The latter track explores paradoxes of emotions and experiences, “Nothing like a bad dream to wake the dead,” and blends the surreal with the all-too-real. The song’s dynamics rise and fall like the emotional waves it portrays, with viola and drums creating a powerful sense of resilience and vulnerability.
The title track, How Love Bends, grapples with the theme of love’s complexity. The music swells and recedes, and wraps around Fountain’s vocals to echo the twists and turns of a relationship. The song feels disorienting and comforting, and when the strings replace the vocals, we are left with an impression of sadness and acceptance.
In City, Fountain explores the ideas of yearning and striving. “Anywhere worth fighting for, I do not want what I have not got yet.” This tension between desire and fulfilment underpins many of the album’s songs. This track builds slowly, with soft piano chords giving way to a steady swelling rhythm, creating a sense of forward motion while maintaining a reflective tone.
He Commands You to Jump into the Sea uses whispered vocals to create a potent mix of mythological and personal storytelling. The song’s imagery—“We’re falling all the way to heaven, falling for you boy”—evokes a sense of giving in to the unknown, whilst up turning the normal order of things. The production builds drama through rising strings, steady bass and drum, complementing the soft delivery of the lyrics.
Drake leans into a darker, enigmatic space. Deep bass and reverberations set the scene for a story of love and betrayal, with the repeated line “If looks could kill,” adding an edge to the song’s mood. The music amplifies the tension of the lyrics by nearly coming to a halt before crashing back with a dramatic outro, a musical embodiment of love’s volatility.
Memorial, the album’s longest track, serves as a powerful closer. Over six minutes it builds from quiet introspection to a crescendo of defiance. The repeated refrain “Come dance in the shadows, dance in the shadows” circles back to the theme of finding solace in darkness, as introduced in the opening track, Come Down, and embedded throughout the album. The return to this theme at the album’s end brings the listener full circle, suggesting a cathartic closure to the journey.
How Love Bends stands as a progression from Fountain’s 2021 album IRIS. While IRIS showcased her use of genre and narrative, this album’s sound is more distilled, lush, and focused which is a testament to Khan’s melancholic strings, Canzek’s steady bass work, Robertson’s delicate and syncopated rhythms. Kahn and Gooding’s production choices ensure the soundscapes enhance, and never overpower the lyrics. There is a greater strength in how she handles the themes, providing continuity with her previous work while also pushing into new sonic territory. The production allows the balance of sound and silence, of spoken and sung word, to shine through.
Overall How Love Bends shows that Fountain’s artistry lies in her ability to weave complex emotions into both lyrics and sound, creating a world where contradictions coexist, and where love bends but does not break. It is a significant step forward in her discography in New Zealand and positioning her for a place on the international stage.
John Bradbury
Reb Fountain’s How Love Bends is due to be released Friday, March 7th.
