Blindness & Light – Your Ghost (2024)
Reaching into the heart of humanity, extricating the gritty rawness, holding its bleeding bag of sonic desperation to the light, and meandering through the open wound; this is Blindness & Light – our at least a really gruesome metaphor for the enlightened sound. A complex collision of vulnerable fragility and hopeful optimism, all linked in a moving melody, Colin Potter and his crew ride a rollercoaster in an intriguing, elegant adventure. With international critical acclaim and a growing global audience, the UK-based informal collective ensnares people’s senses from the outset (as they did ours a few years ago and we haven’t stopped listening). So, cross your fingers and take a plunge into the latest addition to their repertoire, ‘Your Ghost’.
With a shared appreciation of post-punk and grunge, Blindness & Light have been compared to The Smiths, Joy Division and Radiohead. Yet, while their music has been a delight for the past few years, the time for change always arrives; ‘Your Ghost’ is a testament to the end of an era. No, not the end of Blindness & Light – God forbid – but the closing of one chapter to open another. Blindness & Light explain:
“To mark the end of the first phase of our informal collective we decided to release a cover of Kristin Hersh’s ‘Your Ghost’. Having just read her fantastic book, The Future of Songwriting, it seems appropriate in the light of our split from our previous producer and our everlasting love of 4AD records…”
Taken from Kristin Hersh’s 1994 album Hips and Makers, the original ‘Your Ghost’ adopts an acoustic folk sound melding a subtle guitar with flits of strings beneath the tender vocals. Brimming with melodic melancholy and poignant vulnerability, a desperate tug exists plucking heartstrings and prompting tears.
The final collaboration with producer Tony Denmade, Blindness & Light adopts a simplistic acoustic-inspired sound in ‘Your Ghost’. A sophisticated combination of Chris Hall’s bold bass, Denmade’s keyboards and Colin Potter’s guitar captures the simplicity of Hersh’s original; however, a meeting of acoustic and electronic instrumentation floods the track with kaleidoscopic swirls. A strong similarity remains in this cover, but Blindness & Light simultaneously shake the track in a twist of grunge making it something entirely different.
Find out more about Blindness & Light on their official website, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram and Spotify.
This artist was discovered via Musosoup #sustainablecurator
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