The new single from Quentin Moore, “Kiss Your Lips,” doesn’t so much start as it seeps into the room, lowering the lights and raising the temperature by a degree or two. Moore is at the piano, his vocals draping over the notes with the patient weight of heavy silk. The entire thing feels excavated from some lost ’70s studio session, a slow jam built not for the radio charts, but for the quiet, charged air between two people after the rest of the world has gone to bed.
It’s a sound built by a roomful of experts in atmosphere. The bassline from Uncle Flip (Ray Flippen) is a steady, reassuring heartbeat in the dark, while Bobby Sparks coaxes a warm, syrupy haze from his synthesizer and Rhodes. But then there’s Nigel Newton’s vibraphone. Its notes appear like the briefest glint of light off a perfectly still martini, an unexpected detail that makes you lean in closer. It adds a peculiar, almost celestial shimmer to the profound earthiness of Taron Lockett’s drumming and Magnus Klausen’s guitar.
The whole track is an exercise in ecstatic surrender. Moore isn’t singing about a simple crush; he’s describing a state of being completely remade by another’s touch. When he sings of being turned “into a beast,” you don’t picture a monster, but something more like a sundial finally being allowed to forget the sun, content to only tell the time of its own shadow. This is intimacy as a form of benevolent hypnosis, a complete dissolving of the self.
It leaves you feeling oddly implicated, a bystander to something impossibly private and sacred. Is a love this all-consuming a sanctuary, or is it a beautiful, gilded cage for two?
