Digressions #4 – Living Slow EP is the latest in John Blek’s series of download-only releases available via Bandcamp. With Blek also on guitar, banjo, and synth, he is joined by a rhythm section featuring Kenny Miles on bass, Hayden Miles on drums, Brian Casey on piano and Keys, and Matthew Berrill colouring between the lines with clarinet. Living Slow was whittled down from a 10-track album born of lockdown to these five numbers. It’s a moodily atmospheric affair that opens with the rime-encrusted feel of the slow-trudging, minstrel-folk-mottled Autumn Lament, with images of leaves “dropped by the branches to rot in the gutter” and “the bones of a blackbird, frozen, forgotten”.
Taken at a slow walking pace, an echo to the vocals, Forgiven opens with ominous talk of “bodies beneath the boards”, although the following line about “secrets in my past” suggests this be taken metaphorically, the song about being open in a relationship (“I would never lie/Never be untrue… Nothing to conceal…I’m yours always”).
Built around a circling musical pattern, Burning For You shares a similar train of thought in its fires of passion and desire (“Your lips, my tongue/Your heart beating/A spark, the flame/Your mouth, my name”), things taking a slightly more musically strident form with the slow steamrollering Blood In The Dirt, the lyrics complementing the musical menace (“20 eyes open, 10 jaws are broken/Silenced by violence again/The shepherd is leading the flock by deceiving/The fool can be led astray, how easily you look away… there’s blood on the altar/The weak were the first ones to go”) with what feels like political undercurrents of false promises.
It ends with the lighter shades of the gently crooned, piano-waltzing title track, a song about not cursing lost youth and accepting the lengthening shadows as the sun goes down with serenity as he declares “Living slow is all I know/It’s the way I’ll stay ‘til kingdom come”..
A sublime collection, there remains one more album recorded during that period, O To Be; hopefully he’ll be digressing for a fifth time in the near future.
Digressions #4 – Living Slow EP (October 2, 2026) Bigg River Recording Company