Pilgrim Fathers
Short Circular Walks In The Hope Valley

"Small Circular Walks in the Valley of Hope" officially vies for the award "What the hell did they mean with this title?", edition 2008/09.

If nothing else, it feels very "post"...

Add to that a cover that looks like a frame from "The Seventh Seal" on which one of those spongy candies they sell at the cinema (one of the worst pairings I've seen since Laurito's thong), let's just say the circumstances leading up to listening to this debut album were not the best...

The path that these Pilgrim Fathers (a quintet of students from the art school in Nottingham) seem to want to embark on is that of a strange bastard breed of space rock built on bewildered and battered musical architectures, where the linearity of the typical song structure gives way to the sinusoidal and schizoid motion of a roller coaster.
An album in which languid, heavily melodramatic passages, evidently indebted to certain impalpable Pink Floyd-like atmospheres or to certain expansive Mogwai-like landscapes ("Great North Road"), contrast with sudden detonations of post-core origin ("Old Man Time In The River of Rhyme").

A musical pastiche with a very broad sonic spectrum, starting from certain sluggish, ragged blues (borrowed from the seventies hard rock tradition, complete with a prominently displayed Hammond), arriving at furious guitar rides where a whole whirlwind of echoes, reverbs, filtered voices, special effects pilfered from Dik Mik's playground, and hyperspace Gregorian chant scenarios...

An album not without charm, which, playing on contrasts, on the clash-meeting of very different musical elements, succeeds in the endeavor to paint enchanting, alien atmospheres, but also tense, painful ones, in precarious balance between paranoia and dream ("None Hands Of The Octopus").

And yet, this "Short Circular Walks..." continues to not fully convince me...

Perhaps it is the very "musical project" at the base of the album that leaves me puzzled, its dangerous resemblance to an overly insisted-upon sonic patchwork, an exaggerated, obsessive cut-and-paste of riffs, time changes, styles, genres... A mosaic whose pieces are indeed placed next to each other, but without there being any real adhesive to blend them into a unified figure.

An album, in short, that, just like the "small circular walks" of the title, seems to embark on many, perhaps too many paths, yet never truly arrives anywhere...