Lo and Behold - Onward Journey Tape
'Onward Journey' is Louis Harding's debut album in solo mode as Lo and Behold, leading us far off the path beaten by his past output in punk and hardcore groups too numerous to mention. Ten tracks of tilted homemade music in a voice as English as wildflowers and war crimes. Under it, taut basslines unfurl like Sad Lovers and Giants adapting to a powercut while drum machines flirt in and out of phase lending the recording the feel of a lost Minimal Wave classic rescued from the rain.
There's something sinister to this odyssey, too, a bricked-in greenhouse, unexploded ordnance in the hedgerows. We hear of class war, starvation, accumulation, a virus, a bullet, and another, and another. The traps are pointed out as we march on: nostalgia, fear, entitlement, technology: "the network reaches everywhere." The muted melodies recall Martin Newell, Dan Treacy and countless fellow travellers along that folk-addled axis of melancholia britannica. 'Onward Journey' unfolds as a Berkshire gothic, diving deep into the doldrums yet never dejected, propelled by a deep warmth and resolve. Our narrator is alive to yet never cowed by the dark closing in, marvelling instead at the great passage of time and its equalizing effect...
If this must be filed under 'bedroom pop' then the windows are flung open to the horizon, and it's No to twitching curtains, No to paranoia, No to withering on the vine. Instead, we bear witness to the curiosity of a lifelong songmaker in his fourth decade: rooted but never parochial, a reassuring guide pointing around the next bend, easily convincing us to stay a little while longer, just to see where we end up.
-Bryony B
Split release with Gob Nation - UK/EU folks order here:
gobnation.bandcamp.com/album/onward-journey
Inscrutable #11