Lowgold
Promise Lands

As the smell of coffee spreads through the room, the CD starts spinning while I open the booklet with that detachment you can have when you meet your neighbor, unknown yet familiar.

I had received the disc - the last work of their career - three days ago, but it stayed there, near the player, like a commuter about to catch their train. Perhaps it was that threat in the shape of a cloud, as large as an entire city, on the album cover that kept my desire to free the disc from its cellophane wrapper at bay, as if it were just a packet of crackers.

The confirmation of the ominous feeling comes soon, very soon, just twenty seconds into listening. "We don't know how to act/ Something is buried here": here's Clear opening the album, with that acoustic guitar that sounds like a cicada in winter and the keyboard that pulses as it would in a TV crime report. You might call it anxiety, maybe melancholy, but you would be mistaken, because it's an indefinable mood that you already know, heard somewhere among the tracks of previous works by Lowgold.

And as you try to define the sense of enchanting yet unexpected hope that unfolds in the first chorus, you think about how musically pleasant and fitting it is, so pop, so British, and so vaguely soul at the same time. Is it possible? You don't know the answer, but Lowgold on Promise Land manage it as they always have.

Then you think about how far away the days are when Lowgold opened concerts for just anyone like Grandaddy or Coldplay, and how many magazines once featured the name Lowgold, now almost forgotten in the attic of the music industry. We’re not talking about a cornerstone, that's for sure, but this Promise Land sounds, if nothing else, fresh and enjoyable, in its own unique way, just as any good work done with integrity sounds unique. They're still Lowgold, we were saying, but you feel something has, more than broken, worn away. "Beautiful don't mean always", and the warning from Burning Embers couldn't be clearer. We'll never see Lowgold on the covers of Il Mucchio again, fame burns, like the embers on which they now promise to set sail. The paper boat from "Welcome to winners" comes to mind, and not just that, because in the meantime the four-four time of Don't let love in points directly at the sound of previous works.

Despite this, you can hear a different production, and a composition that sometimes attempts to find other paths, often abandoning the guitar interplays of their beginnings to nod towards much more rock solutions, or maybe remotely wave ("Just like skin", "Dead Sea"). It's certain that the sound becomes more precise (the malicious would say cunning), and where the guitars don't reach, the mixer can always fill in: listen to Nothing Stays the Same to measure the distance separating this work from Just backward of square, the debut that brought them into the spotlight.

Well said, Darren Ford, nothing remains the same: times change, seasons rotate, and the next big thing from fifteen years ago is no longer big, nor even a thing. Let alone next. I think of this as the bitter arpeggios of Hope and Reason, the last track, spin like a broken carousel. So I can momentarily picture what these Promise Lands must be, territories of half hopes and unmet expectations, where what might have been will never be. For this reason, Lowgold remain a promise, despite everything, kept to the end. For the consistency and - one might say - the obstinacy with which they have pursued their own stylistic idea of guitar pop-rock, which remains intact despite never producing absolute masterpieces and vast crowds singing their choruses.

A promise almost like this - by now - cold coffee, which I could have drunk hot, and which now leaves only its aroma in the room. And while I hear Ford sing "This is suicide...", I take one last look at the cover and that dark cloud over the motionless city. How much I miss Lowgold today.