Camberwell Now - All's Well (Mega Blowout Sale)
SKU
ReR DUP 0022
The Camberwell Now were led by Charles Hayward, the drumming/vocalist mastermind behind This Heat, and was the band that he formed immediately after This Heat broke up.
They were released an album and 2 EPs in their lifetime, and this includes all of them in complete, chronological form, plus a track from a sampler.
Their sound was very informed by the This Heat esthetic, with more creative usages of drones than before and some incredible basswork.
While they didn't always quite achieve This Heat's greatness (on the album they came damn close, while the EPs are spottier), like This Heat they were far too short lived. This is highly recommended!
"After the demise of This Heat, Charles Hayward continued to work with Trefor Goronwy, bassist from the last manifestation of the group, the two of them joining forces with Steve Rickard who, for the new band, designed the cassette 'switchboard' a kind of proto-sampler - but that's not the half of it (Steve's article fully explaining the device is reprinted in the new, expanded booklet that comes with the CD).
Musically, Camberwell both followed and departed from the style of This Heat. Formally and gesturally there are common elements, but there is far greater transparency and the sound palette is quite different: the music is more placed than grown, as the slow accumulation and evolution of material in This Heat gives way to a more immediate and orderly development of the material in Camberwell Now.
The songs - nostalgic, scary, quietly desperate - peer into the future to find harbour but confront only fragments of ruin. Debris and disturbance eat away at the root and corrode each shiny surface (this is mostly the musical work of the cassette switchboard).
The juxtaposition of powerful, virtuosic playing and the eerie, often unidentifiable keenings, chords and constant motion of the cassettes is one of the things that make Camberwell Now so expressive of its time - when the whole social and political fabric of a no-longer-great Britain was unravelling.
This definitive edition collects the entire released output of the group together (two EPs and an LP) newly re-mastered by the band and repackaged with full notes, lyrics, additional photographs and artwork."-Chris Cutler
- LabelReR / DUP
- UPC752725022828