Hospital Ships: "If It Speaks"

I've been listening to a lot of early jazz lately and one thing that's struck me is that, on the vocal tracks, it was pretty common back in the day to front load the song with improvised soloing, with the singer not coming in until the midway point. Quite a switch from modernist preferences, which dictate that the singer is what everyone paid to hear and the "noodly" stuff should be saved for later in the cut. "If It Speaks" kind of harks back to that ethos, a slow, metronomic build up to a real nugget of a single. It's genuinely risky in that a lot of listeners who might have been totally into it as a pared down indie pop could potentially be turned off by the loose structure at the beginning. Don't be one of those guys.