A two-finger synth melody is picked out, melodically precise, in that way Depeche Mode wrought so many classic hooks from as they shifted through Construction Time Again and Some Great Reward, striding out of the pure pop of the Vince Clarke era and heading for the proto-goth sampling of Black Celebration. It’s a pop melody with darkness a-bubblin’.
Then comes a sweet male vocal courtesy Dicky Moore. The synths in the breakdown have that foreboding fizz out of the John Carpenter ‘it’s-about-happen’ handbook. Something about the melody is really deeply European.
And all the while, in the accompanying video that you can watch below, there’s a parade of dark leitmotifs: neon-backlit, silhouettes, moonlit trees, knives, bare bodies … something is eerie in Bearcraft’s world.
“Outside in the Morning Snow” is the first shadows of the dusk for what is only the band’s second album in ten years, Fabrefactions, which is being released by Australopithecine Records come September 4th.
According to Dicky, it explores the “ … the essence of acceptance of impending doom from fractious political factions or forces of nature”
He said: “When life, as Stephen Pinker puts it, is a battle against entropic forces, peril is always close. ‘ … Morning Snow’ is about that, and about the solace that can be found in accepting this foreboding reality. ”
The forthcoming album follows 2010’s Yestreen in aiming to lift the lid on the dark side of your subconscious, like Angela Carter or the Brothers Grimm for the synthwave age.
Fabrefactions has a pilgrimage upriver at its heart, says Dicky; Essex-born, it moves upriver and into the capital borne upstream on a lighter of “ … electronics, overheard ghost stories and half-remembered urban myths.”
It was written in a Dalston flat after that fear of every musician, a diagnosis of acute hearing loss; it was laid down in London Fields before being mixed next to the motorway in Bristol over a period of ten years.
Fabrefactions will come on a limited red vinyl run of just 100 and may be ordered here.
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