Altsounds - The Slow Life – Be Not Afraid [Album]

What’s in a name? The cover of ‘Be Not Afraid’ shows an elegant painted landscape with wild deer roaming across sweeping hills. This and that band name suggest some rural folk idylls within. But that’s not what is on offer here. The Slow Life is four Londoners who deliver – as suggested by the name – a curious twist on slowcore. Most of the songs are played slow but not always quiet. The band have spent time to imbue and detail their songs with soft drones, subtle but eerie atmospherics and haunting silences and dramatic pauses. Singer Darren Bancroft may not be a whisperer in the slowcore style but has a plaintive yearning to his vocals. Talk Talk is the key musical reference point but over the 50-or-so minutes of this their debut recording, The Slow Life also move between the austerity of Low and Red House Painters, the post-rock of A Silver Mount Zion and even hint at the sparse indie-rock balladry of say early Coldplay (but don’t let that put you off).

‘The Hunter Street Drift’ is the closest to ambient post-rock, echoing notes that intertwine around each other and the underlying piano motifs before being engulfed by fluttering electronic effects suggesting the beating of wings and approaching footsteps. ‘Levity’, the seven minute album closer, is far from that – sparse acoustic guitar is eventually joined by cello at a funereal pace whilst Bancroft sings “be my saviour when the walls burn”. The Slow Life really don’t go for laughs.

But they do deliver an earnest, highly accomplished long (or is that slow?) player that, like Talk Talk, brings a studio-bound, almost claustrophobic, approach to the English pastoral. Whilst not wholly original, ‘Be Not Afraid’ sounds singularly fully formed and is definitely worth spending time in its rich and spacious folds. If a bit same-y over eleven tracks, there are sufficient textures and moments of sonic invention to draw you back in. For their next record, I’d like them to be even more adventurous and move away from those pedestrian moments. But given this album took 18 months to make, we might have a bit of a wait on our hands. They aren’t called The Slow Life for nothing.