There are few things humans enjoy more than trying to work things out. We measure, compare, analyse, second-guess, revisit, overthink and then, having exhausted every possible avenue of rational thought, occasionally realise that we probably knew the answer all along. Love is good at exposing this little flaw in our programming. We can turn something instinctive into an intellectual exercise and then wonder why it no longer feels quite as simple as it did before we started thinking about it.

This seems to be one of the many things Shaun Lyons is interested in, although thankfully he is considerably more interested in turning those ideas into music.

The two singles from The Free States’s Love & Death, “Definite” and “The Eyes Are All You Know”, offer two very different routes into the album. “Definite” is rhythmically assured and tightly constructed, built around a 7/4 pulse that gives the song an unusual forward motion while “The Eyes Are All You Know” is looser and more elusive, and seemingly assembled almost by instinct, its piano chords, immediate vocal takes and expressive guitar work. Taken all together, they reveal an album where the musical decisions are rarely decorative. The oddities are part of the songs.

“Definite” is the more obviously technical piece, but interestingly, it doesn’t sound like one. The 7/4 metre could easily have become the central gimmick and the sort of thing a musician mentions in an interview while everyone else nods knowingly, but here it simply becomes the song’s natural gait. It has that slightly lopsided propulsion of a rhythm that refuses to settle into the expected four-square pattern.

There is something quite enjoyable about the way the rhythm works against the song’s subject matter. The lyric is concerned with comparison and measurement, with the act of trying to quantify a relationship, while the music itself refuses to sit still. It is almost as if the arrangement is demonstrating the problem rather than merely describing it. You can count the beats, but counting them doesn’t necessarily make the emotional situation any clearer.

Vlad Lomadze’s drums are crucial here. There is a muscularity to the track that brings to mind the precision and rhythmic confidence of 70’s Motown, but filtered down through the punchier, more guitar-oriented vocabulary of 90s rock. It’s an unlikely combination.

That also explains why “Definite” works so well within Love & Death. Lyons has talked about the album’s unusual tempos – 3/4, 5/4 and 7/4 – as though they aren’t unusual at all. And perhaps that is the important distinction. The rhythm is no more inherently exotic than a guitar tone or a chord change. The 7/4 belongs to “Definite” because that is how the song wants to move.

Then “The Eyes Are All You Know” arrives and seems to throw the rulebook out of the window.

If “Definite” is about thinking too much, this is what happens when thinking barely gets a look-in. Lyons says the song is almost entirely subconscious and admits that he couldn’t tell you what it is about. The vocals were written and recorded roughly ten minutes later, then recorded again three minutes after that, with the second take forming most of what we hear.

The arrangement gives the voice plenty to push against. The piano chords are one of the track’s defining musical features, providing a harmonic bed that feels more exposed and spacious than the rhythmic architecture of “Definite”. Then comes the guitar solo, played on Lyons’ old PRS Custom 22 10-Top fitted with ’57 Lollars, and there is something appropriately personal about that choice. This isn’t anonymous studio guitar designed simply to fill a gap in the arrangement; it sounds like an instrument with history being used as part of the song’s emotional vocabulary.

The drums were recorded at More Music Club in Odesa, which adds another geographical location to an album largely recorded in Athens. The movement between places is worth noting because Love & Death never feels as though it is trying to manufacture an international identity. The geography is simply part of the music’s history. Athens, Odesa, Ukraine, Florida and the various musicians who have contributed to Lyons’s records exist in the background.

“Definite” is a song you can almost see being constructed with the 7/4 rhythm, the drums locking into it, and the arrangement finding its balance while “The Eyes Are All You Know” feels more like the opposite, with a melody and vocal arriving much sooner.

Both approaches feed into the larger personality of Love & Death. The album moves between rhythms and textures. There are Indian rhythmic ideas, unusual metres, strings, guitar led passages and quieter moments, but they exist as components of the songwriting rather than badges of musical sophistication.

That may be the most interesting thing about The Free States. Shaun Lyons understands the mechanics of music; a 7/4 rhythm can be technically complex and still simply sound like the right rhythm. A vocal recorded within minutes can be less polished and more convincing. A guitar solo can come from an instrument that has been sitting around for years and still feel completely right for the moment.

“Definite” counts its way through uncertainty, while “The Eyes Are All You Know” more or less abandon the counting altogether. Perhaps this is why the ambiguity does not diminish Love & Death.

It allows the listener to hear something that Lyons himself may not have consciously put there.

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