Close the door of the flat and step onto the Mews. The lamps strung across the passageway lie still. No breeze tonight, and the night-sky up above is a silver-blue dark, an upturned bowl holding only a few stars.
I press play on my decaying i-pod and start walking.
A new album by a favourite band is an odd thing, familiar and unfamiliar simultaneously. Coming home tonight, walking fast down Western Road and not daring to hope the albums might have arrived. Forcing myself into Tescos and the newsagents. No point rushing. They won't be in. Get home just after 8:00pm, and there at the foot of those steep and narrow stairs, that familiar spiky handwriting on the envelope, ink-stamp on the back And Also The Trees
Took an age to put it on my i-pod. Bad internet connection and slow technology, faltering leads, old-age for the USB. Close down the laptop and start again. Syncing i-pod. Do not disconnect
Leave the Mews behind and start to listen.
'Only' a desert dream of a song, a whisper of some Victorian exoticism like a half glimpsed dream from childhood. Blue, summer nights in an emptied land. Something victorious and dark and luxurious. Grandfather clocks and the taste of attics. The guitars sound like a long train through a night country, an elegant elegiac passage; 'you come closer through the slack, umbilical streets'. Head up onto Portland Road and they've covered the crumbling massive building opposite in wrapping, an industrial cellophane, and I can't remember what was there before.
(Or where I'm going. I search for the street that leads up onto the Old Shoreham Road but can't find it)
'Hunter not the Hunted' A muted brown and sleep-coloured afternoon autumn song. Sky all overcast and laced with something cooled and alluring. Drenched in gold September, a heavy moorland call, and something like ancient birdsong hanging over it all. 'I know where all the birds hide'. A geography of a slow landscape that has been here forever.
'Burn Down this Town'. I'm somewhere in the streets between Portland Road and Old Shoreham Road. I've been here before but I've lost my sense of direction and everywhere begins to look new and strange and I begin to feel unsure of where I am. The streets are empty, and the song is cool and beautiful, and like looking across a wide river at dusk, boats shifting on the swell and recess of a tide. A harbour song, and I search the words for a sign of the sea, but I find a town instead, where two women walk its outskirts, its borders, and 'will never return'. Disquieting words over a song now that seems too calm. An inland song, but I see that deep-black, beautiful water, empty of reflections, emptied of stars.
'Bloodline' Footsteps in a house at night. Waking up in a narrow room and listening to the song of steps outside. This sounds like the small hours, quiet and watchful, an M.R.James or H.R.Wakefield moment. 'You never know whats waiting there'. Another room for Lucy. Remember that utterly terrifying version of that song they did on 'When the Rains Come?' This is like that, something cold and 2:00am. Deep English folklore, whispered myth 'a cold hand on your skin'... and then the song opens into a fairground of an ending, rags of tents in the breeze and the taste of fields, and I can't tell whether this place is deserted or sleeping or just waiting for someone to arrive.
'My Face is here in the Wild Fire' Transmissions from somewhere. Faulty wireless playing songs in an empty room. The sound of trains, and a certain sobriety and certainty to the words of my night-companion's voice. The streets this end of Hove are so still. The halos of the street lamps seem frozen, but in the distance I can taste summer - or at least the premonitions of summer. Walking alone and thinking of photographs. But it's starting to feel like I'm being followed. This feels a deep-in-the-night song, somewhere remote and haunted, 'a ghost wilderness of pollen and seeds'.
'Black Handled Knife' We're nearly halfway through now. These transmissions continue. I remember back in the 90s walking through the streets of Worcester, listening to 'Farewell in the Shade' or 'Green is the Sea'. Lost in my mid-twenties, and here I am, walking through other streets in another town, listening to the new album by the same band, and I am glad of this. I turned 40 yesterday, an impossible age to be. I remember buying cigarettes in the petrol station halfway up London Road, the blossom covered lane where I would phone Corin from a phonebox, and it all seems just a few hours ago, but it isn't even last decade but the decade before. This song is still, a sinister cast of a shadow over another moor. Sound of something in the distance, a night-factory, some nocturnal industry... and it starts to feel like the desert again. Too many stars in the sky of this song. A mexican sky perhaps, a place full of Mediterranean constellations... but I'm in Hove and there are only a few stars above me.
'The Woman on the Estuary' Three chords, and this is the crown of the album, something beautiful and eerie and oddly heroic. I pass under the black bridge over Sackville Road, and I feel the pulse of the Old Shoreham Road in front of me. Pass under the bridge and a man walks past me and vanishes into a garden. Something here in this song, something from Worcester that reminds me that the past is still here. These empty streets are beautiful and haunted, and again I'm feeling followed, 'bring it up to me'... and I could be 24 again, in a narrow room in a house in Worcester.
'What's Lost Finds' A sudden urban shift... and in 'the rotting lanes of this town' there is a sound like farewells
and wastegrounds. Icicle-hours and bicycle wheels twisted and shivery, leaning against half-brick walls, weeds pushing up through the spokes. Back in Hove I pass by a house all boarded up, and also the petrol station where I used to work. See Mike behind the counter, but don't stop and say hello. Pass by Hove Park, and these places I know more at night than the day.
'The Knave' Staccato steps, a wooden leg fairground lurch. Pass through a fraction of Hove Park, and I start to see foxes in front of me, still in roads, and watching me, but as I approach they race off in the lamplight shadows and vanish. Before I heard this album, I was sure this was going to be an instrumental. Another deep-night timed song. The small hours have been passed and there is no dawn, but 'I feel the rains slowly passing'. Even if this night is elongated at least it is as elegant as it was begun.
'Whiskey Bride' Summer. 'Secret doors secret rooms'. We switch from something soft and yellow and like mornings to those certain kinds of afternoon that come sometimes in late August, slipping into the shadow of autumn, a melancholy slumber in the sudden cold of open windows.
'Rip Ridge' Another river song and I'm nearing Wilbury Crescent again. Pass by my old house, and the guilty darkness of my old room. This was where I first heard '(Listen for) The Rag and Bone Man' half a decade back. In a nearby front garden, overgrown and covered with weeds there is a squat tree where hanging from the branches are rusty unlit lanterns. I pause to almost take a photograph but curtains stir and I am afraid of being seen. This feels like standing on a river and watching someone watching you across that slow moving deep-rhythm water 'with its ghost ships and lies turning like a beast in its sleep'. All these songs are like tides, like rivers, the deep and haunting waters of estuaries, half sea and half not-sea. Something pushing up and pushing back, and its in these halfway places that bits of driftwood are cast about like ghosts, and in the waters of these places, whirlpools merge and are lost, hidden in the ebb and flow, the wax and wane of untrustworthy water.
'Angel, Devil, Man and Beast'. I am tired now and it feels like I have been walking for days. I pass by no-one and I am suddenly lost, unsure of what direction I am heading in. I try to head for home, try to seek between the houses glimpses of the power station chimney near Shoreham, its cyclops red-light eye like a signal fix me, but I don't find it, and the houses round here begin to expand and become strange. Mock tudor mansions that look like they should be on the outskirts of Worcester, and I play with the idea that I am back there, in some street I've never been to before. The stars in the sky, and the black branches of still-leafless trees... I could be back there couldn't I? 'I wasn't pushed I wasn't led'. I can't work out which way is north.
'The Floating Man' The melancholy that accompanies the last track of an album you've waited what seems an age for. 'He strikes out in the dark falling...' A last and desperate reaching back for something, not some memory, but something never there... but should have been. White bulbs of lamps up in the trees, and there are suddenly so many trees. A deep haunting to end their most eerie collection of songs, this tidal-river of an album, full of shadows and cool water, whose currents and eddies will, without doubt, prove the soundtrack to these next few months.
It ends so beautifully, like something hopeful and sudden. Something that might linger, that might, or might not be, be the sun rising.
Well I'm back home now, sat on my bed, and it's twenty minutes to 1:00am. I've listened to the album around three times or so.
These were my first impressions.
The album can be purchased at their website here, along with the rest of their rather startling and fantastic back catalogue.
