Everybody's Sunset is the latest collaboration between James Johnston and Steve Gullick who have worked together since the early days of Gallon Drunk and those amazing single covers, James over the years has worked with or in among others PJ Harvey, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Big Sexy Noise as well as becoming a well-respected visual artist. Steve is an acclaimed Photographer and member of Tenebrous Liar. This album was recorded at their respective homes using whatever instruments came to hand.
The album opens with The Moon & The Stars an instrumental full of strings gently caressing us as we gaze at the sky.
Shimmer has a gentle piano with long bowed notes, dappling the ears, less harshly but like the music on I Was Dora Suarez. This is rather elegiac as it slowly progresses.
Fear Of Everything has a similar sense of dread to the musical parts of Nico's The Marble Index, an pieces like Facing the Wind.
Save Our Souls is brittle strings, trying to find a way out of the horror of the last few years, as the choral voices try to sooth our anxieties, as Steve starts to sing and pray for our souls to be saved, like a modern hymnal this could also be performed with a huge choir behind it.
Ice Moon has frozen strings, gently bowed and plucked with the odd noisy interjection, with James and Steve singing of the Ice Cold Moon in an almost croon.
The Town That Couldn't Sleep sounds like they are waiting for a showdown at dawn, in a misbegotten western, with the piano notes marking the slow walk to the middle of the main street, to have that one final duel to finally settle things. Eyes peeping out from behind windows as ambient noises come and go like Charles Bronson's harmonica once did.
Medieval Death Song leads us slowly towards the pits of doom, as they conjure up visions of Mechthild, or the plague pits that were so much worse than Covid, chilling sparse sounds.
Greater Silence has vocals that sound like a poetic sermon or eulogy for what's been lost encased in slow deliberate strings salving our souls.
Who I Who stays in the reflective mood with downbeat piano notes poking through the slow portentous strings.
The album closes with Everybody's Sunset a nine and a half minutes song of memories and regret among the ululating strings, piano, weird noise interjections as the contemplation in the lyrics muse on the final moments before we are no more, as the beauty of the strings give way to harsher noise intrusions as the China gates open before you.
Find out more at https://godunknownrecords.bandcamp.com/album/everybodys-sunset https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1243075476 https://www.facebook.com/sevengulls
