APRIL 2024 - Review of Night Swimming single EVERGREEN
Articles in LOUDER THAN WAR: (Author page here)
Photo by Cindy Tolhurst
The pandemic has taught us is that art and music is created by ordinary people doing extraordinary things. How about if Paloma Faith fell on hard times and ended up delivering your new kettle from Argos? What if you go to give your binman a Christmas tip and it turns out to be Gary Numan? I guess you’d get used to it, and so might they."
An album of veil’d Melancholy, with a capital ‘M’ - "We make a foray into dark art-folk where we might encounter the ghost of Robert Mitchum as Harry Powell in the 1955 film Night of the Hunter, while we’re lured to the edge of an initially foreboding sci-fi swamp."
With Lol’s good friend and collaborator Budgie having penned the foreword, there’s a wholly reliable endorsement of what’s to come. The chaps host the podcast Curious Creatures, which boasts the tagline ‘Post-punk – You think you know the territory, but we drew the map’. It follows that it’s fair to moor the post-punk sister ship to the galleon of goth, because these amigos were also instrumental in drawing up that nautical chart.
Photo shows Lol at the grave of W.B.Yeats near beautiful Sligo.
SEPTEMBER 2023 - Review of Lol Tohurst's book GOTH: A HISTORY
AUGUST 2023 - Review of Ashton Nyte's album AUTUMN'S CHILDREN
JULY 2023 - Review of Heartbreak Noir's E.P. MAJOR ARCANA
FEBRUARY 2023 - Review of Dark Star's album ...OUT FLEW REASON
JULY 2021 - Think piece: ORDINARY PEOPLE DOING EXTRAORDINARY THINGS -
AUGUST 2020 - Think piece: AGE CANNOT WITHER THEM? - the art of the musical memoir
From the off we’re in 4AD territory, a label that surely would have been the natural home for Night Swimming 40 years ago. (And maybe even now). Evergreen is an understated whirlpool of arpeggiated, reverbed goodness; you can just picture the row of well-loved and stomped on BOSS pedals.
"Blokes making noise with wood, strings and sticks, and with fire in the form of electricity, like frighteningly intelligent cavemen taking giant leaps across Zallinger’s ‘March of Progress’, trampling on Homo Erectus, Home Sapiens and Neanderthals, gleefully flicking the Vs at Darwin as they go."
"An atmospheric Pink Floydian introduction, complete with citrusy Spanish guitar which sets up an imaginary scene in an ethereal spaghetti Western; all dust motes and low sun."
"Unlike Elizabeth Wurtzel, at 27 my life experience was limited, and I didn’t have much of a story worth telling. Now I feel I do. There are things people don’t know about me but that might be of interest. I can’t compete with Angela’s Ashes, but there is, if not misery, then plenty of poignancy and bitter-sweetness to be shared."