Pleasure Systems: “Leave It in the Sand” Album Release

As Pleasure Systems, Clarke Sondermann tries to capture the sum of his experience as it slips through his fingers. His songwriting is quicksilver, stringing tender, fleeting moments together as they trail off into the dark. On his 2021 debut, Visiting the Well, the musician dealt with the aftermath of losing his partner. In the five years since his last album, Sondermann is in an entirely different place, having built a life for himself that can withstand hardship.

Leave It in the Sand is capital-R “Romantic” in both the loving and art historical sense of the word; big-hearted and plain overwhelmed by the weight of its feeling. Most often the “reason” behind most of life’s greatest mysteries elude Sondermann completely. Sondermann weighs these in his hands and allows them to float in gorgeous suspense.

A deeply annoying fact of life is that ultimately you do have to choose to be happy, and to find justifications to keep living no matter how lonely, painful, or dispiriting it might be. What is a natural skeptic supposed to make of ordinary happiness? How do you appreciate what you have in front of you without hedging for disappointment or loss? Across his album, Pleasure Systems finds reasons, loses them, and finds some more, until the struggle for meaning becomes an elegant, profoundly human kind of dance.

Photo Credit: Eve Alpert