DAVID BENJAMIN BLOWER
Kindness Is Solid Stone Violence is a Heavy Loan to Pay
(Bandcamp)
You live next to Benjamin Blower. Fucking hell, when will he stop singing? Three AM and he’s still at it. You can’t get to sleep. But when you do (and you will), you wake up thoughtful and wondering and the leaden rain is wondrous and the tides of Birmingham traffic surround you with the notion that you are somewhere special.
You travel.
Ain't that nice.
I wonder if Ben was ever violent because he seems so weary. Is he carrying a load of his own violence, or is it other people’s violence? On Empty Thyselves he urges us all to ‘pay back your enemies with love, my friends’ and, right there, he pins down the magic reason that holy people become holy, because they understand this simple idea blesses their own lives. I wish I could be holy.
This album, with his own multi-tracked voices as a Jekyll choir to his addled Hyde solo voice, which occasionally swings into Shane MacGowan on his second one of the morning territory, is a Sunday morning any day of the week - the kind of Sunday morning that comes from staying up all Saturday night and drinking yourself into sobriety. Blinking and realising you spent the night in a chapel in the 19th century. Then your mobile phone beeps, dammit.
Essential Information
Kindness Is Solid Stone Violence is a Heavy Loan to Pay is available now, check it out on Bandcamp⇒
David Benjamin Blower will appear live at Outsideleft's Studio 67 on Friday Feb 2nd, 2024.
