Like the Edgar Broughton Band on downers, but full of love.
Duke Garwood returns with his much anticipated follow up to 2015’s Heavy Love, but this is no follow up, it’s a deeper immersion into Garwood’s heartbreak. Like returning to a dream you half remember, it has that uneasy sense of the familiar while never quite knowing what’s real or where it could end.
Garden Of Ashes follows in the deep furrow ploughed by Heavy Love, but rather than simply retreading his steps, Garwood has dug deeper. Much, much deeper. By album’s end, he’s dug the musical equivalent of a wartime trench to defend against heartbreak, burying emotion in deep layers of rhythm, groove and musicality.
Each track is a little vignette of remembrances and things you ought to remember, where the edges all blur together. Opener Coldblooded sets a dark, salacious tone that lingers long after. Each track is a long, deep breath, taking in hope and building apprehension. With each new song, this sense of foreboding only deepens, but it never quite reveals all of its mystery.
What is does reveal, on stunningly transcendent moments like Blue, is Garwood moving into the sublime. Its beautiful, dreamlike guitar lick sounds like a million songs that all remain just out of reach. You can’t help thinking you’ve heard it somewhere before, but then it’s nothing you’ve ever heard.
And this hypnotic, surreal feeling continues with sly winks and nods layered throughout the record. Sing The Sky has something of John Martyn’s Solid Air, or does it? The title track has an almost sleazy folk sound and vocals that bring to mind Leonard Cohen’s raspy misanthrope.
This is all crowned by the album’s finale, Coldblooded, The Return, which brings the album full circle with a wonderful reworking of the opener. It’s The Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter through a methadone fog. Simple, repetitive and inescapable. With a vocal background hook that sends you further and further down a rabbit hole of your own imagination, it brings to mind Smog’s I Break Horses with its powerful, moving and wonderfully gentle lilting crescendo. It’s a such a clever deconstruction of an already brilliant thing.
This an amazingly balanced album, with only two perceptible gears. In his less groove laden moments, Garwood is reminiscent of records like the aforementioned Smog’s Drinking At The Dam, where he foregoes his more naturally soulful side in search of dark ballads. Folky, without labouring under the weight of folks history and expectation.
When he then switches up a gear, there’s an upbeat musicality to even the darkest moments, which gives a feeling of futile positivity. It’s like a slightly funkier sibling of Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s Death To Everyone or I See a Darkness, where languorous heartbreak somehow feels like a beginning.
This lingers with elements of more aggressive bands doing similar things. Garwood matches these artists’ hypnotic and mesmerising rhythms, only with a less confrontational intensity. You can feel Black Angels’ dizzying Entrance Song or Manipulation psychedelia, Thee Oh Sees’ The Dreams’ paranoid intensity, The Cave Singers’ stoned country soul, all distilled into a subdued, quiet, unassuming set of songs.
Artists this natural, relaxed and inspired make music seem simple and brilliant. They make you think you could do it, that it’s simply just about being passionate. It’s not.
This album is proof of that, because its emotional weight and depth beyond lurk below its easy exterior, and once heard there’s no clambering back out of its cavernous beauty into the real world.
