A Grave With No Name – Passover

A Grave With No Name's sixth album, Passover captures the spectre of death but its existential meditations can be obscured

Album Review by Eugenie Johnson | 17 Jan 2018
Album title: Passover
Artist: A Grave With No Name
Label: Forged Artifacts
Release date: 19 Jan

After the death of his grandmother, Alexander Shields spent some time at his family home – the same one he shared with her during his early years. As such, it’s perhaps little surprise that his sixth album as A Grave With No Name is concerned with themes of death and mortality, an ethereal, ghostly presence wrapping itself around its tracks.

While Shields has slightly stripped back the large ensemble of players found on 2015’s Feathers Wet, Under the Moon for Passover, the streamlined band manage to craft something deeply cinematic. The lilting acoustic melodies and Americana-tinged slide guitar, chunky basslines and dramatic percussion are further brought to life by field recordings, which bring a haunting realness to the tracks. Shields doesn’t so much represent a world as he does haul the listener directly into its centre.

The haunting atmospherics of Passover can be of a double-edged sword though. While it often captures a mournful tone, the 'interlocking short stories' that Shields attempts to weave are sometimes engulfed by the intense sounds around him. While his words do occasionally come to the fore, such as on the emotional Wren, the questions Shields raises surrounding religion and ceremony, the elemental and the domestic, can feel secondary to the atmosphere. Passover captures the spectre of death, but its existential meditations can be obscured.

Listen to: Wren

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