For two years, the most beautiful man in pop music shunned the limelight that he and his former band, Japan, had attracted before an untidy split in 1982. Pained by the industry that had bestowed on him his vacuous title, and being encouraged toward deeper contemplations by his girlfriend, photographer/designer Yuka Fujii, David Sylvian ruminated on issues of faith and the collapse of everything that had propped up his career to that point.
Brilliant Trees (1984), the first of Sylvian's post-Japan solo albums, is a pensive, pastel-hued record of that internal struggle and the redemptive powers of love. Evoking something of his previous band's new wave affectations on opening track Pulling Punches, it evolves into a something quite different, the remaining six tracks revealing the influence of the jazz and ambient music he had been immersing himself in since disconnecting with his former life.
Sylvian engages musicians who are well-versed in meditative improvisation: Can's Holger Czukay plays dictaphone, guitar and French horn, Yellow Magic Orchestra's Ryuichi Sakamoto plays piano and synthesiser and Spontaneous Music Ensemble's Kenny Wheeler contributes flugelhorn on a couple of tracks.
The result is a kind of measured spontaneity, if such a thing is possible. Within the form and structure of these moody ballads, there is fluidity that takes the melody and Sylvian's sleepy baritone in unexpected directions.
Nostalgia floats along on a stream of low synths as Sylvian sings of "cutting branches from trees shaped by years of memories" in an attempt to exorcise his ghosts, while on jazzier single Red Guitar he finds comfort in the company of someone who shares his "certain difficulty of being". Weathered Wall takes that relationship further, acknowledging a feeling of rejuvenation "where there was a will to learn".
The title track closes the album, finding Sylvian at peace with his uncertainty and with sharing his burden. "And there you stand," he sings, "making my life possible."
