GARWOOD,DUKE - Garden Of AshesCD)

In the face of an apocalypse, we all need a safe house. A place for sanctuary; not to hide, but to claim for our own. On his new album, South London’s unlikely bluesman Duke Garwood has found the perfect place for us all, and says it’s time to meet in the Garden of Ashes. “I am an angry man; so angry I burn myself. So angry I heat up the air around me. This is the nuclear fuel I use to make music,” tells Duke. “In a world so full of pain and madness we need to be better than ever; to evolve not devolve. To become masters of our fate and stop listening to the snake talkers who would steal our last breath. It’s time to go Elvis and shoot the cursed TV.” For an artist who claims to be angry, there’s a lot of love to be heard in Duke’s music and in the face of impeding Armageddon, just as Nick Cave claims in his film One More Time With Feeling, the only way to fight anguish is with positivity. On Duke’s sixth album Garden Of Ashes, that’s precisely the message. "I make beautiful music, because we don't need angry music right now. Everyone can turn on the TV and see the horror show, they don't need to hear it coming out the stereo. I’m trying to distil this frustrating feeling we all have right now into something more focused.” Only in the Garden of Ashes can such furious frustration be channelled. Whilst last year’s Heavy Love thrust Duke into the spotlight with well long-overdue praise for its clarity and the “mad blues” charisma of a musician at his 20-year career peak, Garden of Ashes takes it all up a level, higher than many would think possible. “This album is about midnight in the garden of love. The garden of good and evil. The garden of paradise that we know is being destroyed to satisfy the greedy money people. It's all burned down. We burned it to ashes.” Whilst fans, fellow artists and collaborators including Josh T. Pearson, Tinariwen, Mark Lanegan, Kurt Vile, and Savages’ Jehnny Beth all marvelled at Heavy Love and its depiction of an artist who has always cut his own groove, Garden of Ashes is equally doused in magnetising imagism (Coldblooded The Return brings the record full circle with slightly altered lyrics as though its grown wiser throughout the course of the album and Sleep nods to the writing of Werner Herzog). “I was inspired to follow Heavy Love with a warm bath of honey for the soul. It's a stare down to the beast of hate trying to take over our garden. Time for Man to be the beautiful warrior and stand up for his loves,” Duke says.