"One of Britain’s most quietly intriguing artists returns with an album that is both familiar and refreshingly different to what has gone before": Ned Vessey reviews the new album from Ben Howard.
Ben Howard - Collections From the Whiteout (Album Review) Tuesday, 06 April 2021 Written by Graeme Marsh
‘Collections From the Whiteout’, the fourth album from Ben Howard, represents the first time he’s taken a leap of faith with an outside producer. Aaron Dessner, of the National and recent headline-grabbing work with Taylor Swift, is the man given full access, bringing a fresh perspective that results in an album unlike any of Howard’s other work.
Here the Devon songwriter pulls inspiration from personal observations and odd stories springing up from news headlines, with the bubbly synths of opener Follies Fixture providing the backdrop for an immediate curveball. Finders Keepers, an eerie tale based around a friend of Howard’s father finding a body in a suitcase, is weirder still.
Rolling Stone Ben Howard Drops Nautical New Single ‘Crowhurst’s Meme’
Track is off upcoming LP
Collections from the Whiteout
Collections From the Whiteout, out March 26th via Republic Records.
Featuring Yussef Dayes, the song is accompanied by a video that portrays distorted images of Howard in a field as the track ebbs and flows with chaotic synths. “Saccharine party baby/Laughing and ha horrah!” he sings. “Well, what’s a riverbed sleep?/Coveting, cheating.”
“Crowhurst’s Meme” is about Donald Crowhurst, a British businessman who died at sea in 1969. “This song was firstly inspired by a wonky synth guitar part that I had which had a kind of seasick quality to it, which in my head had a tenuous link to the Donald Crowhurst story the famous tale of the amateur British sailor who died whilst sailing around the world,” Howard said in a statement. “These two things seemed to marry and so it became a sort of exploration of the undocumented uni