The Declining Winter – Really Early, Really Late (Album Review)

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An ambiguous studio hum, a strum of pastoral acoustic guitar and a hushed, mysterious lyric kick off The Darkening Way, the first song on The Declining Winter’s new album, Really Early, Really Late. It quickly develops a mood of melancholy and of shifting uneasy beauty. The Declining Winter’s songwriter and composer, Richard Adams (a founder member of Leeds indie stalwarts Hood), is happy to dwell in the most liminal of places: this makes for a music that is disquieting, unnerving, and often difficult to pin down. As well as having varied psychological effects on the listener, Adams’ music maintains interest levels by dint of its impressively wide-ranging genre fluidity. Post-rock structures are decorated by flourishes of modernist chamber music, indebted to groups like Rachel’s, or jazzier touches like the shuffling drums and licks of electric guitar at the beginning of the title track, which then morphs into something that sounds like an amalgam of Richard Youngs and Talk Talk.

The solo work of Talk Talk frontman Mark Hollis is an acknowledged influence on Adams, and the two share an innate ability to create a consistent but strange atmosphere out of a wide range of musical styles. Song Of The Moor Fire is creeping pagan-folk, awash with ambience and punctuated by impressionistic drum patterns, passages of sublime, flighty brass and squelching electronics. Yellow Fields is a bucolic, psychedelic chamber-folk gem, while This Heart Beats Black has a stretched-out post-club vibe, a kind of apocalyptic comedown.

The tone of Really Early, Really Late seems to darken as the album progresses. Wandering, sad strings give a rainy day quality to The Fruit Of The Hours, while the ten-minute How To Be Disillusioned is full of harsh chords: a bare rock of a song that somehow opens out to reveal hidden crevices. Towards the end, a propulsive drum beat kicks in, pulling the song, confusingly and thrillingly, in multiple directions at once. The final track, Let These Words Of Love Become The Lamps That Light Your Way, admits a strange and distorted kind of optimism. The melody is all the more powerful for its inscrutability: there is something familiar in the weird sounds, but they are put together in wholly surprising combinations.

There are many ways of describing The Declining Winter’s sound – haunted shoegaze, perhaps, or devotional chamber music, or ambient dream-folk – none of which do it any justice. It’s better to think of Adams’ work as an integral if obscure feature of the British musical landscape, like a stone circle hidden behind a housing estate. It’s a back catalogue that is ripe for discovery, and Really Early, Really Late is an enticing place to start: it is engrossing, sometimes playful, frequently pensive, and never less than captivating.

Rusted Rail (Cassette/Digital Download)

Home Assembly (CD/Vinyl)