it starts with a sadness, a loneliness. sometimes i don’t believe the light will ever come again, he says. it starts with a static spirit, an ache for something beyond this. all those nights gazing into the sky watching other forms of life pass by, he says. it starts with a call to arms. go break the ice, he implores, baptise me in the stream.

amen brother.

oh it’s a joyous thing to hear railing against ugly with beauty, fighting poverty (in every sense of the word) with poetry. i will wear my heart upon my sleeve for daws to peck at. fuck irony it sings, we are unafraid of emotion, raw and articulate. yes indeed. drawing parallels here with constellation’s thee silver mt zion…

not as much of an overtly political, as personal protest. not to be confused with shouts and slogans. not crass (in every sense of the word) but the frenzied bliss of words and song and rhythm the ex offer at their most ecstatic. folk music (of a kind) that shares some common ground with current 93 but one calling not for the nihil revolution/revelation of david tibet’s apocalypse, but for the romantics reaction to the industrial revolution. not laying down guns or tools anyway, but sloughing off the shit of life, the detritus, switching off tv’s and monitors, throwing away phones and fridges, leaving the apartness of homes and strip-lit offices for the streets and squares and fields and oceans.

there’s an urgency, a momentum carried along on probably their most musical record, like they’ve finally grown into their junkshop instruments. semi-acoustics. the sorrow of brass band punk hymnals. strings and skins and voice. a restless background buzz of textures and electronics, the sound of things coming apart / coming together.

hmm. elegies to things coming apart / coming together. what a compelling thing this life is… or as jeff mangum put it, how strange it is to be anything at all. it’s a world-weary world he/we/they live in. a curious psychogeography, landscapes as bucolic as they are pocked by pylons and ballard’s out of town sports stadia and shopping malls. it’s of the north i s’pose. viewed with a longing from the south. newcastle horizons and london landscapes; factories and pastures, abandoned cars and call-centres, hedgerows and night-sky’s (stars being a recurring theme) drowned out by relentless electricity. leylines marked by telegraph poles.

childhood dreams, a haze of mnemonic places. the magic of the land lay in the madness of the light, he says with the grotesque curiosity of youth on the larkin-esque observers book of birds eggs. as he crushes one found bird-egg after another. the urge to discover and collect without an understanding of what you had between clammy fingers. lost time. another life. history crackling across dead wires. the telephone a flat-line.

dunno if it’s nostalgia but there’s a yearning there, for a new way of life based on an old way of life. the present’s fucked. the question asked, why can’t things be the way they should? hell the records split by an instrumental titled sadness, ignorance and longing… so it’s a kindof concept album. tendrils of narrative through ten tracks. meta-folk tales. broad strokes. the inevitability of life, love and loss. trying to be happy with all the sad shit in the world. connections. seeing beyond the here and now. forging paths. pasts and futures.

it’s an angry record. it’s a sad record. it’s also warm, intimate, delicate. even at it’s most disgusted states, what matters to me is surely, how we treat each other. it’s happy breathing. stark. gorgeous. lyrically, and musically. a record that looks to a future, so very quiet. carrion crows nesting among the power lines. a world without motorways, where the roadkill’s not dead, just sleeping.

band of holy joy / exotic pylon