Track: Solander – The Woods Are Gone (plus name your price download)

Wintery sadness, gorgeously delivered. 

The rhythm is the perfect rendition of walking through snow – always trying to go faster, but caught by the weight of the drifts, the sadness, the longing. The shimmering snare shivers under the song like skirring flakes pelting across your eyes in moonlight and bitter winds. On top the guitar leaves you, the listener, as bereft as the narrator – hooked but unsatisfied, hoping for a sudden explosion, a release from the tempting, insistent, heartbreaking melancholy.

Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. That’s all I seem to have been doing with this song since I first heard it a couple of days ago.

So strong is the evocation rendered by this song that, on Monday on the way to work, walking out of Kings Cross into a still-dark swirl of pelting rain and hammering wind, I was transfixed, transported to stumbling across fields as a teenager, eyes streaming, nose, lips, ears numb from the winter cold, determinedly staggering forwards to escape rejection, drunk and resolute, brutally fresh in a newly shattered reality. 

You can download this for free if you want, from Solander’s bandcamp page. But you won’t do that, because it’s too good, too strong.

Look to the album, “Monochromatic Memories”, out in the next few weeks on A Tenderversion Recording.