Afterglow
Author: Tim Cumming
View album and artist detailsAlbum and Artist Details
Artist/band: |
Jon Boden & The Remnant Kings |
Label: |
Navigator Records |
Magazine Review Date: |
December/2017 |
After Bellowhead disbanded in 2016, Jon Boden set about regrouping his band The Remnant Kings to record Afterglow, with fellow former Bellowheaders Paul Sartin and Sam Sweeney, as well as Sweeney's partner in Leveret, Rob Harbron, and Richard Warren, among them.
The album is the second instalment of a dystopian trilogy from Boden, a companion release to Songs from the Floodplain, but relocating Boden's narrative from the skewed English pastoral to an urban street festival, through which two lovers try to find one another. According to Boden, it ‘imagines a near-future world where the luxuries and comfort of 21st-century life have become scarce, and a harder, simpler existence now prevails.’ Inspired by the dystopian fiction of Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy, as well as the Dark Mountain Project, a collective reflecting current upheavals in ecological, economic and sociopolitical norms, the album is lyrically dense and musically multilayered. The sound palette includes rock, chamber and folk – it's a prog concept album akin to some of Pete Townsend's solo works. Repeated listenings tease out many fine moments – the orchestration of ‘Yellow Lights’, for instance – as the album soundtracks our going to hell in a handcart, with the wheels falling off.
The album is the second instalment of a dystopian trilogy from Boden, a companion release to Songs from the Floodplain, but relocating Boden's narrative from the skewed English pastoral to an urban street festival, through which two lovers try to find one another. According to Boden, it ‘imagines a near-future world where the luxuries and comfort of 21st-century life have become scarce, and a harder, simpler existence now prevails.’ Inspired by the dystopian fiction of Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy, as well as the Dark Mountain Project, a collective reflecting current upheavals in ecological, economic and sociopolitical norms, the album is lyrically dense and musically multilayered. The sound palette includes rock, chamber and folk – it's a prog concept album akin to some of Pete Townsend's solo works. Repeated listenings tease out many fine moments – the orchestration of ‘Yellow Lights’, for instance – as the album soundtracks our going to hell in a handcart, with the wheels falling off.
