"Things Rise and Fall" arrives as the first proper taste of *Lion Dance*, and it announces itself less like a single than a small ecosystem. Built on the bones of Taoist philosophy lifted from Laozi's *Tao Te Ching*, the track could easily have collapsed under its own conceptual weight — half-baked spirituality set to noodly synths is a well-worn trap for musicians relocating to Southeast Asia and coming back with a laptop full of field recordings and big ideas. Webb sidesteps the trap by keeping his ear firmly on groove even as his head wanders off into metaphysics.
Logan Kane's bass playing does a lot of the heavy lifting here, slippery and elastic in the way only a player steeped in the LA fusion underground can manage, threading through Webb's keyboard work like something alive rather than merely accompanying it. The rhythm section doesn't sit still long enough to be called a pocket; it breathes, contracts, occasionally lurches sideways just to see if anyone's paying attention. Fans of Louis Cole's rhythmic sleight-of-hand will recognise the DNA, though Webb's version feels warmer, less interested in showing off than in serving the song's central conceit — the endless cycle of ascent and collapse, dressed in synth tones that shimmer like heat off asphalt.
What elevates the track above mere technical flex is its restraint. Given the cast Webb had at his disposal for this album — Prince's drummer, Bowie's bassist, a Radiohead collaborator lurking somewhere on the same record — it would have been easy to overstuff "Things Rise and Fall" with guest spots and virtuoso flourishes. Instead the arrangement stays lean, almost meditative, letting Kane's basslines and Webb's harmonic choices do the philosophical heavy lifting rather than any grandstanding solo section. The result sounds less like a jazz-rock showcase and more like a genuine attempt to render impermanence in sound — rise, fall, rise again, without resolution, because resolution was never really the point of the Tao Te Ching either.
Melbourne expats who relocate to Singapore tend to write songs about hawker centres and humidity. Webb has instead absorbed something closer to a worldview, and it shows in the way this track refuses easy catharsis. The melody circles rather than climaxes, the groove tightens rather than explodes, and somewhere in that refusal lies the song's quiet cleverness. It trusts the listener to sit with ambiguity, a rare quality in a genre that usually can't resist a big finish.
Coming from an independent artist working entirely outside major-label machinery, "Things Rise and Fall" is a confident, unhurried statement — proof that psychedelic fusion doesn't have to mean chaos, and that borrowing from ancient philosophy doesn't have to mean pretension. It simply means paying attention to cycles, and letting the music move accordingly. A genuinely exciting preview of what *Lion Dance* might have in store come November.