Reigns - The Antigeist LP
The eighth album from mysterious Somerset sibling duo REIGNS (Roo and Tim Farthing). Now expanded to a quartet with the addition of drummer/arranger Rob Ellis (PJ Harvey, Marianne Faithfull) and bassist Joe Thompson (Hey Colossus). "The Antigeist" feels more direct than previous Reigns releases, their folk horror stories haunting their targets with a sharper precision than ever before.
"An eye opens in darkness. A thing of fire roams the world’s forgotten plains. A vine climbs ceaselessly into an empty sky. A nation sleepwalks into the sea.
Now is the time to gorge ourselves on vapours, to put our faith in hidden vaults of gold, to creep to the carpenter.
Now is the time of the empty vessel, the vandal, the void.
The Antigeist is here"
Worked on as a four-piece live band and recorded in a single session at Axe & Trap Studios in Somerset, "The Antigeist" was then taken apart and put back together again over a year of subsequent fine-tuning, chipping away at the music to find its core and ending up with something different than anyone originally imagined.
Long-term fans of the duo will notice some changes immediately. The songs have moved away from the spoken-word and hellish-soundscape approach of the past in favour of more traditional song structures. The vocals are out in the open, communicating clearly and without disguise. Brothers Roo and Tim Farthing are credited by name for the first time, the anonymity of their previous Reigns pseudonyms Operative A and B deemed unnecessary. Something is afoot.
However, the duo are musical auteurs, and no tweaking or line-up additions can alter their uncanny feel. This is a music that creeps and oozes. That gets under your skin. This is still Reigns. It may seem more traditional on first listen, but this new-found openness is a device to drag you into their world more effectively than ever.
The lyrics became similarly unequivocal over time, as Tim explains:
"Faced, as we all are, with the daily drip of unfathomable stupidity and evil - things veered off course too. The songs are about (sequentially): the indignities of poverty, the resurgence of fascism, the dangers and futility of unchecked ambition, the hypocrisy of eleventh-hour religious conversions, grief, immigration myths and suicide. What had started out as a breezy collection of songs became, unintentionally, an apocalyptic statement of disgust"
From the very beginning when the microphone was lowered a mile into the ground, to Dead Centre via The House On The Causeway, Reigns have been storytellers and all stories are born from some truth.
"The Antigeist" is a collection of stories about the time we live in right now. A time where the terrors have stepped out of the pages of fiction and into modern life. These tales of horror are as real as you want them to be and as terrifying as you can dare imagine.
Wrong Speed Records