Super Pyramid’s ‘Comment if This Is Paradise!’, the debut album from Montreal-based artist Ben Rowley is a sweeping, deeply textured journey through the liminal spaces of emotion- grief and awe, solitude and connection, beauty and disintegration.
Crafted across provinces and over several years, the album bears the fingerprints of its difficult birth. There’s heartbreak in its bones, yes- but also the quiet resilience of an artist who stayed in the room long after the lights went out.
What’s remarkable is how lush and vivid the record feels in spite of its themes. Opener ‘Before & After You’ unfolds like a soft-focus memory, all glimmering keys and phantom harmonies, a love song suspended between time zones. ‘Better Angels’ follows with trickster energy- sunny rhythms masking deeper anxieties, like a grin that’s too wide to be trusted. By the time we reach ‘Slow & Easy’, the album begins to spiral outward, rich with strings, horns, and melodic turns that evoke Smile-era Brian Wilson at his most emotionally naked.
Isaac Symonds (Half Moon Run) co-pilots much of the instrumentation, adding ornate flourishes that never weigh the record down. Instead, the orchestration feels like it’s trying to fill the silence left by unanswered questions. The album’s emotional nucleus lies in moments like ‘Never Better’, where Rowley’s voice- worn but unwavering- offers gentle existential surrender: “The search for meaning doesn’t have to stop, But day to day it doesn’t change a lot.”
And about that title: is it sarcasm, yearning, despair, or all of the above? Rowley never gives you the answer- just enough space to ask the question in your own voice.
This is more than an impressive debut. It’s a statement of arrival from an artist unafraid to sit with the chaos and coax meaning from the rubble. For those craving the emotional ambition of Rufus Wainwright, the melancholic detail of Andy Shauf, or the strange comfort of not knowing, ‘Comment if This Is Paradise!’ offers a resounding yes- and maybe.