The pain of forgetting is so acute and Ophelia Moon is able to capture it with such devastating accuracy on the song, Memory fades. It is not only another reflective ballad, but a pensive discourse on the merciless gentleness of time, with soundscapes that sound like a confession in an empty room.
The vocal technique used by Darren O. Moon in this performance is extremely well controlled, never striving to be dramatic when a simple, human touch will suffice. His delivery is as though we are watching someone lose something in real-time, and every line is as though we are losing something valuable. His performance has intimacy to it, which makes you feel like a kind of bystander to some very personal scenes.
The actual eye-opener is the instrumental composition by Ricky Mazzamauro that does not fill the space but leaves it. Dainty guitar arrangements waft through the ambience like memories themselves, at times sharp, at times hazy, always heart-wrenching lovely. The arrangement knows that there are times when the most effective music can occur not in the notes, but in the spaces between notes, the breath between one thought and another.
The thing that impresses me the most about Memory Fades is the boldness to stay put. This is a song that is not afraid to take its time in a musical landscape that never stops moving, that is not afraid to take its time to think, to pause before forcing a particular resolution to come about. The production has a dreamlike quality, which reflects the way memories really do operate in real life: they are fragmentary, impressionistic, emotionally true, even when factually uncertain.
This is Ophelia Moon at their most basic, taking away all the excess and leaving us with the exposed nerve of being human. Memory Fades is not a comfort song; it is not a song of false hope but a song that accepts the bitter-sweet truth that forgetting is part of life and that the most beautiful songs are sometimes born out of that acceptance. It is devastating in its silence and very necessary.