There are few bands who are aware of how potent a weapon silence can be in their music. In a rush to fill all the space on a multi-track studio, the ability to draw a listener closer in by cutting songs back to their bare essentials has been somewhat lost in recent years. As their name implies, The Slow Show have both a magisterial beauty to their sparse songs and the confidence to let their spellbinding four-minute stories find their mark. Rarely since The Blue Nile has a band created such a powerful, fully realised world from what initially appears such a minimal framework. The Slow Show’s new self-produced second album Dream Darling has a hard-won optimism in its 10 graceful songs. It’s music made by five men who, as singer Rob Goodwin explains, have “gone through the typical life-changing experiences that men in their late thirties and forties experience”. Whether that’s the romantic regret of the Tindersticks-inflected drama of ‘Breaks Today’ or overcoming loss in the album’s towering centrepiece ‘Ordinary Lives’, this is music to live in. Dream Darling is a collection of songs that any adult who’s lived a little can identify with, even when the loss, new life and break-ups detailed within feel monumental to the people experiencing them. Having gone on tour in Germany and Switzerland almost immediately after the band formed in 2010, The Slow Show are a major cult concern and festival regulars in mainland Europe, where they’re signed to Haldern Pop Records, the label formed by the team behind the successful festival.
