Album Review: I Can See by Nick Hakim
The Queens-based singer writes love songs with the family in the next room, a sister talking to grandpa in the attic, a brother’s guitar downstairs.
The rough draft of the title song took him twenty minutes; the final four years. “An experiment of how time moves, and we change” is the description of the song by Nick Hakim, and what he tried to achieve over the four years was not a better song but the sensation he achieved with the demo. Each one of the songs on I Can See surrounds it and carries the same idea—that love, family, and the voice of the sister from upstairs are bound to vanish before he finds someplace where to keep them forever.
She appears in the city and disappears again; he remains where she can find him. On “I Can See” he promises his love to be sincere and already in her hands, offers to “live out these days/With what we have, this noise parade,” an expression he values enough to reuse in “Soft Wet Clay,” where the parade is taking place at night, and his love “shifts like soft wet clay/But always stays the same.” For her gift to him, he compares the light, which is impossible to lock into a cage, and when he tries to grasp the gift, he discovers a force that he wants to understand, the pulse beating against her neck.
On “The Reason,” he confesses to spending quite some time learning how to be her man, how to respond when called to look up, the readiness he shows now coming along with the falling on his knees, collapsing the floor, breathing deep, falling again. On the seventh day of May, in “7 Days,” he needed to become quiet, left his anger to spread under the open sky, promised not to drink alcohol anymore and take cocaine, felt the light burning his face, turning him, teaching him, fighting him. “I’m no machine/Just a human being” he tells her on “Barii,” where every day is big talk, while she closes her eyes, takes another sip of the content of his cup, and asks for the one thing he asks her most often, a little more time.
His sister has discovered magic, and on “Real Here Now” she says she can talk to grandpa in the attic. He has not seen the person he is singing to for a while, but he heard the laugh, which sounds just like hers, heard her singing the song she likes to sing always, and promises, “My ears can’t believe what they are seeing.” His brother knows some magic as well, and one of them lived in the attic once. The attic appears again in “U Can Make It,” on top of the staircase he has been falling from, the place he is tempted to return to until he blacks out, and while he calls himself a fool, who cannot make it but tries, another voice answers him, telling him all the way that he can make it, he can break this.
Something is following him everywhere on “River Rising,” quiet, almost invisible, whispers his name and says it is ready to take him away, and he follows him along the way he finds hard to leave or shut out. Family wakes him again: “But then I hear my little brother play guitar/It wakes me up, and I realize where we are.” He is not ready; he needs a bit more time to write a letter he intends someday to recite, and he relies on his family to make it out of this alive. When the storm enters the town, gunshots in the clouds, the river starts rising while the family stays firm on their place, rooted too deep to be pulled out.
On “Endlessly Waiting,” he watches the horizon all day and all night, then follows the window light, sees smoke and time, keeps malice and spite out of it, and waits for the sign that does not appear inside the song; waiting is the main action in the song. “Water” runs even more simple: he in her hands, the sweetest love he has ever known somehow still out of reach, “I feel it come around but still can’t seem to see,” and apart from this idea, the song is nearly empty. Smoke becomes a topic of a song in “Inwego,” chills traveling from his feet to stomach, throat, mouth, eyes, back down the spine, wrapped like a snake that “Leaves a tattoo, a map of/Your mind’s true shape.”
Around her neck, in “Know My Name,” he sees reason and a new gold chain, the one she uses when he calls her. She made up everything she told him, and he accepts that too, the invented stories providing him with a life he is ready to accept twisted. He tells her: “Write it down till you love your pain.” Then he returns to the only request of the song, “I wanted you/To know my name,” and the chain, the invented stories, the mind going insane, all of this is the cost of such a small request.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Know My Name,” “River Rising,” “Soft Wet Clay”