The Declining Winter – ‘This Heart Beats Black’ from ‘Really Early, Really Late’

There was a fine article in The Manchester Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/aug/02/glacial-pleasures-of-slowcore-codeine-duster earlier this year about ‘slowcore’. Stevie Chick knows his stuff and naturally focused the piece on the American bands from that era: Codeine (the vinyl reissues of whose albums formed the impetus for the article), Rome, Low, Galaxie 500. All great groups who made breathtaking records. It was a shame, however, that word count perhaps precluded any reference to UK developments of the ‘genre’ beyond the obvious nods to Mogwai (well, a writer ought to know his target audience’s sweet spots, right?). In particular it was a shame that there was no reference to Hood, whose 1994 ‘Cabled Linear Traction’ album connected the dots between Swell Maps, Roy Montgomery and those sad slow sounds of the young Americans. In many respects too Hood started sketching out the prototype for a New English Pastoralism that has filtered through the last three decades, informing in particular the side of that which swings away from folk traditions and instead looks to the more ambient edges of Jazz and modern classical.

It is a blend of worlds that finds a perfect balance in the hour it takes for ‘Really Early, Really Late’ to unfold, this being the latest in a fifteen year (or thereabouts) string of marvellous low key releases by The Declining Winter. Led by Hood’s Richard Adams, The Declining Winter has had a shifting group of players over the years, each helping to meticulously craft Adam’s visions into reality. On ‘Really Early, Really Late’ he is joined by a team that includes former Hood member Gareth Brown and Epic45 players Ben Holton and James Yates. Alongside them sit more regular Declining Winter alumni Julie Bisset, Sarah Kemp and Peter Hollo. It’s a sizeable group of players and together they make a sound that is both expansive and intricate, complex and simple. Indeed, the record, as its title might suggest, is an enticing combination of opposites, being suffused with an introspective serenity that somehow manages to be both weighted with the darkness of loss and yet be as weightless as woodsmoke.

Chords breathe heartaches and strings pierce the air like kestrels in the summer’s heat. There are woozy Jazz interventions that recall the time when Emily sought the spirit of Alice Coltrane in a Welsh barn. Words are whispered in the shadow of pylons, suggestions of movement and torpor in the same delivery. The cadence is glacial yet somehow captured in a timelapse that confirms our impermanence. Slowness exaggerates the meaningless of human existence whilst focusing attention on the beautiful, invaluable detail of the moment. The devil is in the detail and so is God.