Live Review: Golden Vessel and Emerson Leif team up on hypnotic 'Hesitate'
A beautiful, painfully relatable collaboration between Emerson Leif & Golden Vessel about just how hesitant we all are to embrace love.
As you close your eyes to those opening beeps and synths that lead 'Hesitate', the debut single by EMERSON LEIF and helmed by GOLDEN VESSEL, it's hard for you not to relax. It's like inhaling a ball of light that radiates warmth and soothes every extension of your body. As it flows down your body, you can feel your muscles relax as your mind opens. It's that soothing, therapeutic and damned near curative approach to electronic music that makes 'Hesitate' so irresistible.
Beyond that, the context in which 'Hesitate' was written makes it all the more powerful. “I found myself feeling very alone and without purpose. I could not accept that we just exist: eat, sleep, work, repeat," Leif said of the song. "We are sold a kind of ‘happiness’ like it’s something we can work towards but what’s on offer is fleeting, if at all."
That concept is hard to grasp but also painfully real. Happiness isn't one universal feeling and it's not something we can achieve like it's some sort of prize - it can rear it's beautiful head at any moment, for any length of time before it's snatched away from us once again. And Golden Vessel's gorgeously subtle and relaxed production echoes this.
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To that end, when Leif croons "Tell me that your love is a sure thing", it's hard to ignore the hesitation and vulnerability that bleeds out of his voice. It's that reluctance to dive in head first to love (which is such a rose-coloured, Hollywood lens to look at love through anyway) that is relatable to the human experience. But, if nothing else, the one thing that you can be sure of is that this song is beautiful, the message is relatable, and Emerson Leif is only going up from here.
Words by JACKSON LANGFORD
Image by SEAN PYKE
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