And another new love- why you need Dry The River in your life.
Full disclosure here- this band recently stayed at my flat, when they played a gig at my home town. Their singer, the wonderfully named Peter D’artagnan Liddle, is one of those people who is so obscenely talented you can’t quite understand that they’re a friend of yours. He’s also a top bloke, too.
But of course, you don’t care if him and I get along. You don’t want care if he’s a Nobel Prize winner who’s lovely to his gran.
It’s all about the music, and they’re bloody marvelous. When Dry the River perform, Pete is absolutely wonderful as a frontman- a wiry little twig of a man with the voice of a tired angel, who dances like he’s got some kind of twitching disease and leads his band through songs with remarkable passion, gyrating like a shaman caught in the throes of some kind of voodoo ritual. His songs have a simplicity and directness to them which are both immediate and lasting in their effect, with snatches of lyrics wedging into your subconscious to re-emerge at unbidden moments long after the music falls silent.
The songs themselves tend to favour the personal, and the pastoral- ‘Shaker Hymns’ describes an imagined marriage in a small community, where everyone in a person’s life is around all the time, and in that recalls the yearning for simplicity found in the work of, say, Midlake. ‘History Book,’ another standout, describes the fall-out at the end of a relationship with heartbreaking simplicity- the line ‘we’ll soon forget our parents names’ captures that sadness of separation, more perfectly than I’ve heard in a long time.
The band are exquisite- a stripped-back, delicate acoustic sound envelops and supports the singer’s voice with calm, controlled musicianship. The end result is, well, staggering.
But don’t just take my word for it. Listen for yourself.
