Comes in a wonderful 4 pages digipak and a 12 pages booklet inside
Includes unlimited streaming of Fog Mountain
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about
After a moment’s silence, Saline Grace are back with their latest album ‘Fog Mountain’ and an official video.
During his parental leave, mastermind Ricardo Hoffmann made time for a short guest appearance, joining Hamburg-based band Dark Orange on their latest 2CD album ‘Horizont’. Along with Steven Burrows, a member of English cult band And Also The Trees, on bass, Ricardo Hoffmann contributed on additional guitars and piano. He furthermore created a remix for ‘Interpretations’, the second CD of the same release; other remixes were made by artists like Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins, members of And Also The Trees and many more.
With ‘Fog Mountain’, however, Saline Grace continue on their very own paths, setting great store by the use of almost exclusively acoustic instruments that seem to hail from an antique musical instruments shop. The extraordinarily filigree guitar style with its wistful slide techniques, mandolin-like ornaments and fingerstyle parts is recognisably Ricardo Hoffmann’s, who knows to create pictorial synaesthesias, raising nightly panoramas from imaginatively enraptured roadmovies.
Subtly woven into a dusty sound stage, mainly consisting of piano, organ, concertina, banjo, violin, accentuated drums, not uncommonly played with brushes, as well as Ines Hoffmann’s deeply resonating bass, the listener is inevitably getting entangled in a mystic and sinister atmosphere, drawing marvellously attention to singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Ricardo Hoffmann’s emotional baritone.
Among personal contents, his protagonists act full of symbolism in front of surreal, near-natural sceneries and re-flect frequently anthropological backgrounds, dealing with mankind’s estrangement from nature and within their artificial environment, their culture, too.
Their new album shows Saline Grace more powerful and on their highest level, performing with virtuosity, vigorous dynamics and withdrawn melancholy at the same time.
Indeed, ‘Fog Mountain’ impresses with diversity of its arrangements, variety of vocals and its uniquely captured atmosphere, captivating the listener not only by catchy 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 and Wovenhand
lyrics
'Fog Mountain'
Taken through a bleak, dead mountain
Where only fog and slate grey rules
Where the sky its ugly floodgate opens
He searches for mercy and peace of mind
The clouds, like a plague, are sickly raging
A stinking herd, the world’s purulent discharge
And between clefts like steel , so bare and painful
A horde of grey men is ghostly appearing
‘Follow us into a new regime!’ they say
Then with wagon and throne they move away
But roaming further through fog mountain
Where bitter agony and stone restricts
He meets a bearded man within the torrents
Who sits in the mud, endowed with weals
‘Bread and wine I want to share!’ he says
But stale brew and mildew the juggler raises
A dark haired, pretty woman he meets
Caught by her weird and pale blue eyes
Under the poplars smothered with kisses
They kneel in that madhouse of worths and lies
‘Your hunger I want to allay here!’ she says
With a gently whispering voice and naked
The storm it rages and he stares silently
The mountain devours him, he skedaddles
He watches a raptor tormented by hunger
And presents himself as a fainted prey
‘Your hunger I want to allay here!’ he says
Seriously, with a truthfully cawing voice
credits
from Fog Mountain,
released January 21, 2013
Words and music written by Ricardo Hoffmann
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