Review Summary: The diverging road, it begins here.
Ben Howard is, perhaps, still a fresh face in the folk scene. The dichotomy between his debut and sophomore releases has been the subject of some journalistic scrutiny, hailed as the bold and drastic artistic advent of a singer-songwriter whose career has barely seen 3 years in the limelight.
The Burgh Island EP, a largely uncovered gem nestled between the two full-lengths, has thus gone understandably unnoticed. its a damn shame, really.
Every Kingdom played like a train chugging along steadily, borne aloft by Howard's vigorous finger picking and the wooden patter of acoustic drums. The album had a strong forward impetus, particularly obvious in more upbeat tracks like "The Wolves" and "Keep Your Head Up", but evident even in quieter offerings like "Everything". This inability to sit still gave
Every Kingdom vibrancy and life, and was one of its most defining factors. Its absence, therefore, is perhaps the most palpable difference between
Burgh Island and everything that came before.
This difference is more nuanced than merely that between the upbeat and the dour. While
Every Kingdom had you traveling places with its music,
Burgh Island causes you just to stay put and let the melancholy descend. If his earlier works were adventures through his external influences,
Burgh Island is Howard leading us down a very different road - through the dark recesses of his very private, personal internal thoughts. Opener
Esmeralda severs his ties with optimism, as clouds gather while Howard recounts a dark tale over flecks of uncanny chords - the prelude to the journey he's about to take. When drums coming in deep and pounding with an unnerving baseline, his musings culminate in a proclamation of "
now I'm going places on my own". His newfound solidarity is reiterated in the opening lines of
To Be Alone, as Howard murmurs "
I don't need nobody to be alone" in a low growl as if he's sweating out a fever - the very image he describes later in the track.
Ben Howard earns his stripes as an artist not with his aptitude at the acoustic, nor his crooning affected voice, but with his penchant for storytelling. He writes his music and melodies to describe an image, a scene, and his lyrics work toward the same end. Neither are subservient to the other.
Oats in the Water plays like the foreshadowing of a disaster, as Howard warns "
you'll find loss, and you'll fear what you found" and “
things you never asked her, oh how they tear at you now”, describing a relationship on the brink of an end, and accentuating his despair with a solo that rips and tears at the seams. It hits hard - yet leaves you with the feeling that mores to come. The respite that comes but 2 tracks later in the form of
Burgh Island therefore seems unexpected and a tad abrupt. Nevertheless, Howard's wistful description "
in sepia tones" of a place and a lover long gone, over the pulsating heartbeat of reverb and a duet with a ghost of the past, brings the EP to a beautiful close. It still begs the question, though – what was the point of all this?
Burgh Island didn't make much sense to me on first listen - it struck me as a novel effort by Howard in an interesting direction, but something too complicated or too peculiar to pay attention to. But when the opening chords of "Small Things" brought a deep despondency that somehow felt so familiar, the pieces began to fall into place. When Howard laments "
has the world gone mad, or is it me?", it feels like we're beginning
I Forget Where We Were by joining him in despair that he's sat in for some time, and it is
Burgh Island that began this hitchhike into hopelessness.
Burgh Island is the darker, rougher foreword to
I Forget Where We Were - less sad, but more forceful. The latter album even seems to allude to the themes of the EP at points - the loneliness of "In Dreams" and "Time is Dancing", the taste of death in "Evergreen". “End of the Affair” is perhaps the most direct continuation of Howard’s expository in
Burgh Island, where Howard murmurs “
do I care, do I care, the thunder’s rumbled sound” while desolated by a loss of love, before breaking off into a solo and jam with the intensity of a storm, broken up only by his feral roars that sound in the silence like thunderclaps – the exact image he conjured up for
Burgh Island’s album art. It feels like the foreshadowing in
Oats in the Water finally finds itself fulfilled both sonically and thematically in "End of the Affair", which burns slower but with far more devastating effects.
The Burgh Island EP is the missing link between where Ben Howard was once and where he is now. It provides us a springboard to leap off before the plummet into the depths, and rather than detracting from his change of direction,
Burgh Island accentuates the effect, and is, in my humble opinion, quite essential to the Ben Howard experience.
