Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
The well seasoned traveller, regardless of whether they have gone in search of inspiration, truth or melancholic anarchy or if they have stayed at home, allowing their mind to imagine the world in a perfect image, their own smile lighting up a million street lamps as their mind’s eye sees the ruins of once great cities or the flowering of new hope. All of these adventures are powered by the Dream Darling, the mordant and the biting, the homely and the gentle tones of other people’s voices scurrying around inside their heads, leading them on, leading them astray and always insisting that the reverie continues.
The Slow Show’s latest album is visionary, it is full of ambition and desire but most of all it is one not scared to narrate, to envelop itself into the world of the poet or story teller, a thankless task made abundantly honest, a huge slice of the anarchic game that drives us to satisfy our souls and keep the right to think, even in the face of the delusional and obsessed, of good things.
Dream Darling, perhaps an instruction, perhaps a ploy, whatever the case, it is delectable art, a brief spell in the world that the baritone richness of vocalist Rob Goodwin is seen to be assured and deep, gripping the hand of the listener in the same way that Leonard Cohen manages to gently parade his muses down any fashionable street whilst flaunting them in the shortest of elegant attires. To dream is to sit in silence and let the fundamentals of life take you away, the imagination the greatest of all gifts bestowed upon Humanity when star dust merged with the primordial soup, it is in that silence of reflection that the narrator speaks their mind and The Slow Show’s mind is focused in the reality of life.
In tracks such as Hurts, Ordinary Lives, Brawling Tonight and the superb Dry My Bones, Rob Goodwin, Frederik T. Kindt, James Longden, Joel Byrne-McCulloch and Christopher Hough wrestle with humanity’s issue’s, the silence that carries us all onwards in search of the void it came from and makes it pleasant, uplifting and removes the stick in which we find ourselves being beaten across our souls for daring to believe.
Dream Darling is the case of champagne forever flowing and it is one that is both tasteful and dramatic, as any narration should be.
Ian D. Hall