These days five years seems like an entire lifetime so cast your mind back if you will to the spring of 2020 where while the world was wrestling with the Covid-19 pandemic, there were still musical gems being released including the first album by Matt Hill not released under the one time AUK readers-poll winner Quiet Loner moniker “Savage Pilgrims” which we glowingly described as “small operas of sound carefully constructed and lovingly tooled”. Hill has now released an album of the demos made during the pre-production phase of that album which includes five unreleased songs that never made the final cut. The demos were recorded in Wales with Mike Harries in 2016.
At the time we described ‘Save Your Pity’ as a song in which “you can almost hear the hum of the valves and crackles of long-abandoned analogue recording equipment at work as the narrator dismisses the sentiment in the face of a life lived without regrets. It feels timeless, like some ancient recording disinterred from a mausoleum, deeply atmospheric without being cod or fanciful.” Hearing it in its stark original form just adds to that sense of wonder and reflection. Hopefully we’ll have more material on the way soon but in the meantime you can pick up the whole album on Bandcamp here.
