DOMINIC CRANE has been playing gigs around the area forever, but he’s finally got round to recording some of his songs. First up is the rhythmically loping Beatlesque So Moseley with its circular guitar pattern which tells the true story of meeting the woman who would later become his wife, when he ventured into retro clothing shop called Houghtons looking for a pair of antique spectacles and she was working behind the counter.
DAVID BENJAMIN BLOWER returns to his musical rather than essayist mode with the self-released We Are All Here, a suitably dark and enigmatic affair that variously conjures thoughts of Cave and Waits with its brooding musical textures and poetic lyricism. Given his writing as a theologian, religious imagery is never too far away, the album opener ‘We Are All Here Part 1 offering “God dwells in tents where the beasts sing…God dwells here with everything” and ending with the resonant lines “I wear the past like a tattered robe/Sing into my empty cup/And blow smoke into the firmament”.
Heavy drums wade through the sound effects of the growled Blessings with its raw social commentary on isolation and alienation (“I have no ground/To build my home/I live with outlaws/In HMOs/The streets are hollow/And the eyes are sallow/Mushroom clouds of mutually assured aloneness”), breathing political fumes with “I have no innocence/And neither you my friend/Sat there with your judges hammer/We’ll all be judged in the end/How long should I live/Around the quiet edges/Of your belligerent power/And your stolen scepter?”, the repeated quote "Eulogete tous diokontas" being is a Koine Greek phrase from Romans 12:14 which translates as "Bless those who persecute you”, the line “I'm not a piece/In your culture war/And all your enemies/They’re not mine anymore” a riposte to those who would seek to use difference to divide.
Expectations has a circling tribal chug and again lyrics that speak to a sense of nihilism (“I've gambled everything you gave to me/And if there were any left/I’d pay it back to you, I swear/But there ain’t”), again turning to Chrisian imagery with “What else did I expect/From you yonder hung up bleeding/And where there’s suffering/I know there’s none that you’re not feeling”.
A shuffling rhythm with a rap sensibility, the vitriolic A New Thing again talks of culture wars “gathering you up like bricks to build platforms/The sheep are shorn/Middle class indignation/Shopping for religion/When was progress not self-righteous?”, spitting out “fuck the demagogues” in a call for some kind of rebirth or reset, the mention of hyssop and sage an oblique reference to the Crucifixion. That said, “the book of privileged suffering is writ with words all stole from those who have nothing/All the amenable gods are following their owners like dogs and sniffing their cushions/There is no god who defends your opinions…I saw God making merry with your enemies/Sitting outside your cities in squalor/Wherever you dump your shit/Wherever you deface your land and build a new margin” definitely has whim of fire and brimstone preaching to it.
The density of his words, the metaphors, allegories and imagery are challenging to decipher and interpret, but generally these are songs that might be reasonably described as taking an anti-authoritarian stance, calling out the corruption of those in power (“You can do what you want to who you/Like if you make the paperwork tally up right/The pen is the sword for they who outsource wars”), the boot heel of the privileged on the necks of the weak and poor but woven with a reckoning (“The age to come is beneath your feet/Hidden in the soil where nobody planted it/Resting, buried like treasure under snow and rain./Underneath the rotten leaves/Underneath your dreams again/Breathes like a lake of time welling on the underside”), most notably finding expression in the eerie notes of the semi-spoken The Boot Is On The Other Foot Now, even if you might need a guide to navigate ancient historical and Biblical references to Moloch, Aeola Capitalina and Rachel.
There’s time when it plays like dark poetical sermons as with lines like “The world of men is violence/And violence calls for law/And in the law’s raised hand/All the violence it punishes is reborn/Lawyers are alchemists/The noble and small/And the small and wicked shall inscribe this/Violence upon the forehead of the unsanctioned poor”, while punctuating songs with Greek phrases such as "Kai epi tes ges" in Open Door translating as " upon earth" as in the Lord's Prayer.
The Money’s Gone is another that adopts a rap style, albeit of a more society apocalypse content (“Bank cut the rates like a melon/Damn those/Boats/Damn those wire-cutting mountain/Goats/Damn those Sapiens sowing their/Oats/Damn those bat-shit coders/Law is eating its own hind-quarters… Ay all the money’s gone/Hark, your dragon’s calling”).
Choral voices backing, it comes to a close with the marching rhythm of Come On Down and an intoned call for coming together (“come on down/From yr lofty towers/From yr wearing grind/From yr wasted hours/Oh come on down/From yr endless grinding beef/From yr many wars/From yr castle keep/Oh come on down/It’s friendly soil…take a seat/Around the table/And let us reason/A costly fable…Here, sit ye down/Ye also are summoned/See, the horses roaming free/See the river running”).
It ends circling back with the drone of the murmured, choral swelling We Are All Here Part II and its repeated solace refrain “We are all here/It's alright/Don’t harm yourself/Reconcile” with its healing kiss and cool waters.
I don’t make any claims to have grasped more than the surface of what he’s singing about , but the cumulative effects of immersing yourself in his words and the miasma of his music is one of the year’s most distinctive experiences.
Written and recorded by David Benjamin Blower
Guitars, production magic and design by Chris Donald
Vocals and steel tonged drum by Rosa Blower
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