As we enter the Australian winter, where the haze and the grey and the cold hold us for ransom for a while, we have been greeted with a welcome friend, here purely by coincidence, Goodbye Minnesota by The Declining Winter.
The debut album from Richard Adams, Goodbye Minnesota will be glaringly familiar in tone for anyone who is a fan of Adams’ other outfit, Hood. Here, Adams continues on in the aesthetic of Hood’ Outside Closer and Rustic Houses Forlorn Valleys, but in fact, the depth of sound: the rhythms, the deep basslines, all glisten referentially to the majority of Hood’ catalogue of the past ten years, so much so that Goodbye Minnesota could well have been offered up as a Hood record, such is its quality. Adams uses less directness in his vocals than his brother Chris tends to in Hood, appearing to use vocals to emphasize a textural element rather than a contextual element.
The album is ofcourse wonderfully pastoral, tracks like We Used To Read Books suggesting the bitterness of England’ remote countryside through acoustics and down-tempo rhythms. To Know Gospel finds once again the beauty of texture, here through meandering melodicas, reverberating organs, and shimmering guitars. Throughout there’ an undercurrent of electronics, but with the brothers Adams, it’s often hard to set acoustic apart from electric, rustic apart from contemporary.
For me, the moment of revelry is Last Train To Maple Grove. It comes late in the album, as you are all bleary-eyed and the blankets have melted to your legs nicely. A bass note, then another, appear, haunted by chiming then, a morose neo-classical aspect emerges, strings and synthesizers, rather chorally, and they shift and play together a while like birds, much like A Silver Mt Zion’ astounding 13 Angles Standing Guard “Round The Side Of Your Bed. It’s short, but in the haze of it all it could be ten minutes long.
The poetic The Clock Gently Ticking In The Hall comes in after, and it glistens; Adams waxing as though reflecting on a movement in time, a fleeting observation, a small moment in time turned into words, into song, strangely reminiscent of chamber music played in a recital hall as it plays through.
There’ a whole World inside Goodbye Minnesota, one that belongs to Adams, and one familiar to many of us inspired by melancholy, introspection and lifes rich simplicity.
Steve Phillips
