175: Poor Creature - The Whole Town Knows
The music of Poor Creature ticks so many of my musical boxes it's hard to understand how they've passed me by until now. A timely find then, just a week or so ahead of the release of their new album All Smiles Tonight which is coming out via River Lea Records on July 11th.
It was the Lisa O'Neill mention that initially hooked me in, the band scheduled to support her at London's Royal Festival Hall on Sept 20th. There are definitely parallels their, gossamer-like strands that connect O'Neill's striking folk songs to Poor Creature's slightly more skewed delivery. Ruth Clinton's voice, for starters, carries that same wistful Irish-lilt in its heavy bones, all rainswept and earthy. Then there's that something else, the little glint you can't quite put your finger on, that draws you in and holds you there. Intrigue, some call it. A dream you can't remember; a smell you can't quite place. Magic, others call it and it's that, too.
'The Whole Town Knows' has been out for a little while now but it's a perfect setup for the forthcoming album, a spiralling seven-minutes, sometimes dramatic, elsewhere brooding and oddly powerful. Strip all the music away and it could be an old familiar classic, stitched into the fabric of the country, but instead it comes alive as something altogether larger, wrapped in foggy textures, scattered percussion, a unshakeable sense of grey.
The whole thing feels shaped by the landscape, the people within it, the constant push and pull between those things, and the strange gaps that remain. Just when you think you've got a grip on it, the final couple of minutes steers it somewhere else again, into the unknown, a kind of genre-less space that feels entirely of their own making.
Check it out via the excellently eerie accompanying video below; and find the whole album waiting for you at the end of next week.
Pre-order the album here
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