Kevin Devine made noisy guitar emo with his band Miracle of 86, until he wrote a few tender acoustic songs he didn't feel made sense with his band - so the inevitable thing that happens with the frontment of any noisy guitar band. Circle Gets the Square, Devine's first solo album, was just an itsy bitsy side project record until this whole solo career thing began to attract Devine more and more and whoops, suddenly Miracle of 86 were just a footnote in his biography without a Wikipedia page of their own, while the albums under Devine's own name have kept on coming for over two decades.
But we're far away from that established solo pursuit yet. Here, he's just a dude writing some scruffy songs in his bedroom. But those songs have heart.
The word that springs to mind with Circle Gets the Square is "romantic". Not in the lovey-dovey sense: if anything, the narrators of Devine's songs have a really bad time in that department. But rather in this picturesque, idyllic sense that immediately conjures a sense of time and place, that builds a fantasy out of the life of a musician that us fans then romanticise in our heads. I listen to this album and I get mental images of a young talent bleeding his soul out into some songs that he doesn't know if anyone will ever hear, but that makes them even more precious. More generally, I get mental images of tiny flats, tinier bedrooms, CD player on the side and these songs playing in the backgroud, capturing a moment of time that at that very moment felt like nothing special but would prove to be the kind of formative experience you now reminisce with warmth. Absolutely none of that happened between me and this album - I was over 30 when I first heard this for one and it was also the last Devine album I bought when binging through his discography - but that's precisely what I mean. It's the kind of music that with its very presence paints a vivid, romantic picture of a particular kind of mood and place, which may or may not be real but it doesn't matter. You can practically feel that it is, and that you were bonding to this album during your fragile teenage years.
Devine has done better albums than this. He learned to control his voice better after a few albums and became a better performer, his lyrics became more detailed and his songwriting defter, and eventually he'd start to play around with vague themes when defining the sounds for his albums. But this unrefined start carries so much raw passion within it that it deserves a place comfortably within that wider canon, rather than tucked away as an early years embarrassment (as Devine feels about it, albeit in a kind and sympathetic way rather than dismissive). The songs are simple, emotive ballads with lots of enthused acoustic strumming and occasionally a wider and louder band sound that sounds exactly like getting your mates together to play some songs with you, and all of that sounds so positively cosy despite the melancholy heart of the material. It's the kind of album that sounds like it could be someone's special treasure. Not quite there for me - but I can imagine a different age and a different timeline where it was.
A kind of musical romance, you know.
