“I am rooted, but I flow,” Virginia Woolf wrote. A good formula for those hours we call waking: every day seems to begin in the same room and with the same set of tasks, yet something inside is constantly shifting. Time does not ask whether we are ready for change. All that remains is to notice it-or to keep living on autopilot. Part Time Signals have a rather pleasant piece of advice on the matter: it is better not to stop.
“Waking Hours,” the second single from the upcoming album “Duck’s Back, Baby ” by the Welsh four-piece from Cardiff, sounds like music for that kind of movement. Following “Green Light,” the band takes another confident step forward. And that, I think, is the song’s main charm: Part Time Signals seem to have noticed that they have grown up-and decided to make use of it. The band is not telling a story here. The song conveys a focused state of mind. “Waking hours” becomes a metaphor for being fully present in one’s own life, for those moments when you suddenly stop your gaze and realise: life is happening right now.
The track’s music rests on precise details. Chorus-treated guitars drift above the melody in soft, hypnotic waves. The fuzzy bass fills the middle with dense, enveloping warmth. Keyboards cut through the space with short, slightly danceable phrases, setting the rhythm. The flute of Stephen Black, also known as Sweet Baboo, bursts into the dense mix, filling the track with air. The rhythm subtly nods to the 1960s, but without any overt retro affectation. Recorded by the band themselves at Giant Wafer Studios in Mid Wales, the track retains just the right amount of roughness: it breathes while preserving the feel of a live room.
This very sonic lightness fits the track’s subject perfectly: days replace one another, circumstances shift, much comes to an end, and something else begins. There is a form of acceptance in its lightness: everything is moving, so all that remains is to move with it. The title “Waking Hours” works towards the same idea: a time of presence, when an ordinary day stops being mere background. Catching a change in the light, noticing something new in the familiar, allowing the moment to happen-Part Time Signals transform this attentiveness into music: indie pop with a psychedelic tint, free of unnecessary noise and complication.
If “Another Day In Paradise” and the EP “The Window” sketched out Part Time Signals’ signature, then “Waking Hours” already sounds like the band fully in command of it. There is noticeably more pleasure in the act of playing itself here: the group becomes more precise without losing its lightness.
Ultimately, “Waking Hours” is not a song about how to live a day correctly. It is more about noticing the day at all. Leaving the room, opening the window, feeling the air-and not worrying too much about exactly where the current is carrying you.
