popanz
THE GOLDEN DREGS (UK, 4AD)
w/ MEAGRE MARTIN (Berlin)
Montag, 24. April 2023
Einlass 19:00, Beginn 20:00
Tickets / Event
The beautiful third album by the Golden Dregs, On Grace and Dignity, starts with a scene of a man going on holiday in search of his “best self”. After all, sings Benjamin Woods, “for me and me alone the sun does shine”.
On Grace & Dignity’s origins lie in winter 2020 when Woods lost his job in lockdown and moved back to his parents’ house. The only work he could get was as a laboureron a poorly run building site on the grimmest outskirts of Truro. “It was such a bleak winter – waist-deep in mud digging holes and rolling out turf on top of building waste, really grim stuff, which became the backdrop to the stories I was trying to write,” he adds, citing Raymond Carver, Lydia Davis and Richard Hugo as influences.
In among the personal reflections on loss of innocence and inferiority, Woods spins subtly interweaving narratives about survival, desperate acts of violence, loss and the limitations of community in the face of rapacious gentrification. Nevertheless, it is, appropriately for an album about home, somewhere you’ll want to spend a while. Life here proceeds at a graceful pace grounded by Woods’s deep voice, which seems to resonate from his feet as he delivers the sort of meticulously written lunar wisdom worthy of Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, or the tidy yet revelatory koans of Silver Jews’ David Berman.
Gefödert durch das Programm NEUSTART KULTUR der Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (BKM) in Kooperation mit der Initiative Musik gGmbH. Mit freundlicher Unterstützung vom Kulturamt der Stadt Köln.