While music chases after moment after moment of impulse gratification, Gallant’s “Weight in Gold” plays the waiting game with perfection. It’s a song made up of beautifully-paced buildups and equally beautifully-unleashed payoffs: the bass note that closes the opening riff and opens the song, the way Gallant lets his voice momentarily surge into a falsetto on the third line of the second verse alongside trumpets that keep their polite distance, the way the guitar clunks to a halting stop before the song’s impossibly massive hook.
Gallant’s not an arresting singer – great, yes, phenomenal, sure, but not paralyzing and disarming and momentarily dazing like the best are. Instead, he excels inside our predetermined boundaries of what an excellent voice means (which is perhaps a comment worth noting on his own merits or what it means for Gallant when he isn’t working with such a brilliant record), but take that fact purely within the framing of “Weight in Gold” and there’s an element of brilliance to be admired even in hitting homeruns off a tee stand. It’s a three-minute, twenty-four-second-long crescendo, a song that teeters on the edge of collapsing under its own weight for its entire duration, and it still manages to close upon just six elegant lone notes. It might be a mission statement that lasts for only a song, but it’s powerful anyway: while those around him choose to make their music either grand and sweeping or starkly minimalistic, Gallant takes both.