Pre-order of Blacksmith's Fire. You get 1 track now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released.
Purchasable with gift card
releases September 4, 2017
€7EUR or more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Comes in a wonderful 4 pages digipak
Includes digital pre-order of Blacksmith's Fire.
You get 1 track now
(streaming via the free Bandcamp app
and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the
complete album the moment it’s released.
Blacksmith's Fire
When a dawn searches
Its young morning light
And healthy eyes escape
From being blind
When oceans scream for a water drop’s beat
And an organism blazes by a frozen flame’s heat
When all horizons burn, struggling for breath
And stubborn lungs brave stagnation and death
I will see my countenance
Tightly closed countenance
This vigorous language of silence
When a tree searches
Essential roots and soil
And weak hearts make
Substantial blood boil
When oceans scream for a water drop’s beat
And an organism blazes by a frozen flame’s heat
When all horizons burn, struggling for breath
And stubborn lungs brave stagnation and death
I will see my countenance
Tightly closed countenance
This vigorous language of silence
Suddenly your hands ruffle through my hair
We look into each other’s eyes and share
Strength like smithery from blacksmith’s fire
Far from all appraisement within our human mire
We know farewell
We know farewell
That terrible meal of our conscious mind
We know farewell
We know farewell
Someday forever
4.
Where Our Path Is Going
5.
Sapphire Blue
6.
The Silvery Cross
7.
The Cyclone Of Our Seasons
8.
Down By The Banks Of Oder River
9.
Little Heart
10.
Driftwood
about
Four years after their brilliant album ‘Fog Mountain’, Saline Grace are back with their third and latest Album ‘Blacksmith’s Fire’ and an official video to their song ‘The Dream And The Wings’. Unfortunately, for family reasons co-founder and long-time bass player Ines Hoffmann could apply herself to the album and her instrument severely
limited.
If ‘Fog Mountain’ was strongly dominated by mystically threatening Americana- and Psychedelic sounds, Saline Grace present sophisticated and diverse arrangements without equal on ‘Blacksmith’s Fire’ releasing a tensionfilled album as if made from one piece.
As on their last albums, Saline Grace place value on their familiar, almost exclusively acoustic instruments, which in their interaction, strictly renounce modern styles of music creating a sound that seems to come from between the 1950s and the 1980s.
The extraordinarily filigree, not uncommonly classical guitar techniques and fingerstyle parts, the voluminous mandolin-like ornaments and Ennio Moriccone-like twang sounds are recognisably Ricardo Hoffmann’s, who knows to create pictorial synaesthesias raising nightly panoramas from imaginatively enraptured roadmovies or the imagery of wild and near-natural sceneries.
Subtly woven into a fragile sound stage, mainly consisting of piano, organ, concertina, banjo, classical string arrangements as well as its deeply resonating bass and those jazzy drums, the listener is inevitably getting entangled in a sound experience that is drawing marvellously attention to singer, songwriter and multiinstrumentalist Ricardo Hoffmann’s emotional baritone, who is capable of mastering a falsetto, too.
Hoffmann’s poetry struggles with the great issues of anthropological philosophy, where his protagonists act full of symbolism in front of surreal, near-natural sceneries. He questions the place of man in nature and the progressing estrangement in their artificial environment, their culture as well and quarrels with the all-embracing timeline in our human existence scrutinizing mankind’s forward- or backward-looking behaviour.
The new album shows Saline Grace powerful and on their highest level, performing with virtuosity, vigorous dynamics and haunting melancholy at the same time.
Indeed, ‘Blacksmith’s Fire’ impresses with diversity of its arrangements, variety of vocals and its uniquely captured atmosphere, captivating the listener not only by wonderful melodies, but also by Ricardo Hoffmann’s distinctive voice, who conveys deep melancholy coupled with hidden rage, solitude and, in very few instances, hope as well.
For fans of And Also The Trees, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, The Doors, Calexico and Tindersticks
DISCOGRAPHY
SALINE GRACE - BORDER TOWN SHADES (CD 2007/DWRCD03)
SALINE GRACE - FOG MOUNTAIN (CD 2013/DWRCD04)
SALINE GRACE – BLACKSMITH’S FIRE (CD 2017/DWRCD05)
APPEARANCES
DARK SPY COMPILATION VOL. 17 (CD 2008/Dark Spy Magazine – Issue No. 23)
MICK MERCER - MUSIC TO DIE FOR (Cherry Red Books 2009)
DARK ORANGE – HORIZONT (2CD 2012/KAL41)
ORKUS! COMPILATION 87 (CD 2013/Orkus! Magazine – Issue No. 03 – March 2013)
RELATED PROJECTS
NOBILITY OF SALT - THE EVENING PRAYER (Demo 1997)
NOBILITY OF SALT - THROUGH CLOUDS AND THOUGHTFUL YEARS (Demo 1998)
NOBILITY OF SALT - THE TREMULOUS SEA (first album 2000/DWRCD01)
NOBILITY OF SALT - THE SILENT SHIP EP (CDM 2002/DWRCDM01)
NOBILITY OF SALT - THOSE NARROW STREETS (CD 2004/DWRCD02
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