Best Move is coming to terms with mortality. The cinematic folk-rock band’s debut album, Relational Memory, is an exercise in facing the present: not the end of your life, nor the beginning, but the murky middle. Frontman Kris Anaya has dealt with hard, personal things lately: the passing of his brother, his grandfather, and his mother being diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. He’s not only coming to grips with the accumulation of time but with real-time trauma. He quips, “The older you get, it’s no longer weddings. It’s funerals.”
Relational Memory fuses Jon Brion-esque melodies with the bittersweet sadness of Elliott Smith. Similar to how Smith provided the soundtrack to Good Will Hunting and Brion the score to Punch Drunk Love, Best Move created a cinematic album for those memories that pile up in a town you’ve lived in for years, memories that expand in complexity and depth. The street you drove down while young and dumb picking up cheap beer is the same one with the cafe where you hashed out a relationship. For a second, you feel 23 again, or 31, and then exactly the age you are now. Inside your heart is a little ball of nostalgia that’s joyful, stress-free, and blissfully ignorant of the hard truths that lie ahead.
Comprised of Kris Anaya, Joseph Davancens, and Fernando Oliva, Best Move recorded the album in 10 days at Panoramic Studio in Stinson Beach. Anaya wrote the songs, bassist/keyboardist Davancens, who holds a higher degree in composition, crafted the complex melodies, and Oliva rounded everything out on drums. The single “Real” expresses the eternal choice between a life devoted to art (ideal) or mediocrity (real). He sings, “Well it’s Ion’s choice/Light the halls or recite a voice.” With uneasy anxiety, they’re looking to the future instead of the past—how will their choices affect who they’ll be in 10, 15 years, or more?
These songs let you in on the secret that getting older is bewildering, no matter your decade. Dreamy and unhurried, you’re driving down the boulevard with the band, transposing your own aching memories against theirs. You’re in a liminal space, unsure if you want to look forward or back. Thankfully, the choice was never yours to make. Best Move’s debut album Relational Memory will be released by Park The Van on September, 16th 2022.
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