Musician Better Person, the moniker of musician Adam Byckowski, will be performing in Malta. Heartsbeatingintime will be opening the concert, which will come to an end with DJ sets by Nigel Baldacchino and Adam Byckowski.

As the sun begins to set later and the days grow dark and bitter, Better Person announced his long awaited debut EP It’s Only You and premiered a new song, the weather-appropriate Everything Cold.

Inspired by winter days in his former apartment, an icy top floor flat on Berlin’s Pannierstrasse where he would stay up late and spend his days alone. About the song, Byckowski says: “It just describes a certain mood I was in at the time. The first version of the song was just a classic pop ballad, with almost no beat and a saxophone solo. I came back to it a few months later and changed it completely, turned it into a reggae song. My friend Karolini played the guitar part and Sean Savage sang some backing vocals on it. It’s my favourite song on the EP.”

Better Person’s enigmatic stage presence is matched by his elusiveness as a recording artist. While he’s already toured with the wonderful Canadians TOPS and Timber Timbre, and as keyboard/guitarist with Sean Nicholas Savage, at six tracks It’s Only You is his longest release, encompassing the critically acclaimed singles Sentiment and I Wake Up Tired.

While the EP’s sonic touchstones are all unimpeachably romantic, there’s a more romantic undercurrent of isolation that begins from the way It’s Only You was made – all recorded on a computer at home.

Byczkowski brings to the fore an aspect of the recent embrace of New Romantic soundscapes and R&B emoting: crooning as a form of self-seduction, a kind of therapy, an impossible compromise between the irreconcilable poles of intimacy and isolated self-sufficiency.

It’s Only You slowly reveals itself as an album of (self-imposed) exile behind a façade of seduction

The title itself casually, elegantly captures the paradoxical phase shift which occurs when the movement toward closeness becomes a plunge into solitude. It’s Only You is the sound of turning down the mood lighting so low you’re no longer sure if anyone else is there.

On repeated listens, It’s Only You slowly reveals itself as an album of (self-imposed) exile behind a facade of seduction. In the aftermath of intimacy, one is left with only sensual remnants – smell leads to memory (“I found a smell that takes me home,” Byczkowski sings in opener Somebody Cares) and memories, of home and of people, lead to the question of place and belonging.

Better Person

In Somebody Cares, “I found a smell that takes me home” leads into “I try to notice all the things around”. I Wake Up Tired features the plaintive request Show me a place/where I feel home, while in the still astonishing Sentiment” the singer is left unsure of his identity, with only sentiment remaining, precisely because he will “never be from here”.

For listeners already enamored with Sentiment and I Wake Up Tired, the real revelation of It’s Only You may be the closing track Your Smell which, atop a tragicomically funky shuffle, wraps in a cocoon of beautiful confusion all of Byczkowski’s themes: lost love, lost locales and finding oneself again, fleetingly, provisionally, in their pursuit.

The event is organised by Bee Wild Events and takes place on Friday at Rumours (Pieta Boċċi Club), Pieta. Tickets are available at the door.