What was planned as an extensive celebration of Gravenhurst's 10 years on Warp Records has sadly become an 'in memoriam' to the prestigious song writing talent of Nick Talbot who tragically passed away on 2nd December 2014 aged just 37.
The reissue of Flashlight Seasons, first released in 2003 and a 6-track mini album, Black Holes In The Sand, from the following year now serve as poignant reminders of his underrated Bristol-based band.
A parting gift for fans is a second disc entitled 'Offerings' which comprises ten previously unreleased 'lost' songs recorded between 2000-2004. These include demos and instrumentals plus nuggets like The Citizen, Gas Mask Days and Romance that are every bit as tender and touching as Talbot's best songs.
What first seem to be gentle pastoral folk tunes slowly reveal their bleaker undercurrents. Talbot's lyrics had a way of getting under the skin. This is literally true of Fog Round The Figurehead which includes the macabre line "all of the skin is peeled back but there's nothing to see".
The press release identifies the way such songs take you on a journey "through dark temptations of the city to the ancient rituals of the forest" and, for once, the hyperbole is justified. I Turn My Face To The Forest Floor, for instance, warns us how violence constantly lurks in the shadows.
Hopechapel Hill now has a particular resonance as it links Talbot’s experience of living with epilepsy with the death of a close friend in a car accident.
Hidden demons and psychological disorders are the subtext to many of the songs whose imagery and timbre derive from the most morbid of traditional folk sources.
The mostly acoustic flavour of Flashlight Seasons contrasts with a more electric and psychedelic feel on the Black Holes EP and reveals even darker shades of grey.
The EP includes a modern day murder ballad Diane which is genuinely shocking because no attempt is made to judge or sanitise the grimness of the subject matter. It tells of a man who offers a girl a ride in his truck then states matter of factly "I think I'll just rape you and kill you".
Like still waters, such songs run deep and stick in the memory. They remind us that horror lies in the most ordinary of places.
Moreover, the 26 songs in this collection, together the sorrow of Nick Talbot's passing, stand testimony to the sobering truth that in the midst of life we are in death; the state of non-being which poet Philip Larkin called "the sure extinction that we travel to".
As Nick Talbot said in the commentary to the short film about his life in Bristol and the background to the Flashlight Seasons reissue: “Given the randomness of the world, you have to savour every moment” .
