Comes in a wonderful 4 pages digipak with a 12 pages booklet inside.
Includes unlimited streaming of Border Town Shades
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
ships out within 3 days
€10EURor more
about
Saline Grace is the new project of Ricardo Hoffmann, who is known as the composer and poet of the German avant-garde band Nobility Of Salt. Supported by his long-term bass player and companion through
life, Ines Pollok, the amazing multi-instrumentalist and singer presents his first solo album, called “Border Town Shades”.
Strongly influenced by the works of Dostoevsky, Kafka and Bukowski, Ricardo Hoffmann has written claustrophobicly profound songs about desperation and the blackest depths of misery, candle-lit rooms full of tragedies, forlorn sinners and deceptive roads which are surrounded by broken telegraph poles, low-hanging wires, sadness and peculiarly grown trees, leading into nowhere and failure. He also tells us about the human’s eternal yearning for deliverance and his hope for God’s doubtful mercy, presenting now with Saline Grace a 17-track-album of incredibly emotional depth.
On “Border Town Shades” his extraordinarily filigree guitar style has been woven into antiques such as piano, organ, banjo and marimba, building up together with Ines Pollok’s powerful bass, admonishing bells and stylishly played drums a remarkable mixture of Americana, psychedelic and folklore of old Eastern Europe which creates an oppressively sinister atmosphere.
Within the centre of this soundscape, in the tradition of Nick Cave, And Also The Trees, Woven Hand or Leonard Cohen stands ominously, full of urgency and often with amazing warmth the marvellously narrative voice of Ricardo Hoffmann, who, like creeping out of the human psyche’s repressed depths, sometimes supported by means of using choirs, knows to celebrate his fateful tales and philosophic poems.
Indeed, with “Border Town Shades” Saline Grace seems to roam a sinister valley on a rain soaked, covered wagon whose wheels pass through that muddy soil, where Nick Cave once laid down
The Carny’s old nag named Sorrow.
lyrics
‘In My Room’
Oppressive dusk in my room
But lights like splintered bones outside
A stupid moon doubles up laughing
It sees you struggling far away from me
Where the carving blades of community
Drink off the willing or unwilling blood
Of their beasts of burden
Suffocating heartbeats in my room
And the glass of whiskey shatters
Like a snail-shell
My clinging hand wriggles itself bloody
It shows me slavering pain and absurdity
Where the darkened sky fails
To carry the colour of your eyes
Dead silence of night in my room
And the grotesque face of the
Waiting grey-haired in the corridor
The plants squeal and wither away
They succumb to threat and let me shiver
Where the timeless wayfarer pricks
Our scarred hearts with further needles
credits
from Border Town Shades,
released September 1, 2007
Words and music written by Ricardo Hoffmann
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