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.
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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
‘Nightly Sea’
Standing on the hill
In the lighthouse’s shades
Jack was conscious of his malignancy
Like the sin’s pestilential atom
Which had driven a pure to lust and lie
He was waiting for Desirable Sally
Understanding her misdemeanour
She had become cruel
And let him suffer from
Through the sea breeze Sinful Sally
Left the fallow love of her youth
Stumbling whilst climbing the hill of truth
Acquainted with sorrow through confession
And thirsting for torture she loved the pain
Sally assumed
The recognition of truth
On those trails of martyrdom
Standing on the hill
In the lighthouse’s shades
Jack considered Sally’s sinful body
With the slaughter’s eyes and self-hate stricken
Her fragant flesh he had conceived
Incapable of decency or even love
Imbued with malignancy and hate
They spoke of brotherhood
And humanity
But not bearing her wretched fate
Repentant Sally shed her own blood
Before Jack’s murderously waiting hands
His desperate eyes spoke of that justice
Which had sprung from the criminal’s head
Betrayed Jack took Dead Sally downhill
And committed both pale bodies to the
Purifying strength of the nightly sea
Inspired from the story
“The Dream Of A Ridiculous Man”
by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
credits
from Border Town Shades,
released September 1, 2007
Words and Music written by Ricardo Hoffmann
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