released March 31, 2023

REVIEWS
========

"Although Richard Adams has recently retracted strong hints that the double-length Really Early, Really Late (Home Assembly / Rusted Rail) would be the very last long-form outing for The Declining Winter – it still feels very much like a culmination point in his loosely-gathered group’s story to date.

Joined ably by new and returning accomplices – that include Keith Wallace (Loner Deluxe, Cubs, Moving Statues et al.), Cecilia Danell (A Lilac Decline, Cubs, etc.), Gareth S. Brown (Hood), Sarah Kemp (Brave Timbers, Last Harbour), James Yates (epic45) and Joel Hanson (Memory Drawings) – in various configurations, the album redistils as well as finds fresher uses for the ingredients Adams has sprinkled into his work with Hood, Great Panoptique Winter, Memory Drawings and Western Edges, and on previous releases from The Declining Winter. Moreover, there is a much greater sense of space in the nine largely lengthy tracks.

Yet, for all that has gone into the mix, this is not an unwieldly hodgepodge but a sublimely cohesive collection full of beatific sadness, graceful calmness and understated desolation. With Adams’ breathy vocals sat somewhere between those of The Sea and Cake’s Sam Prekop and – curiously – James Johnston of Gallon Drunk in non-snarly mode, they convey some of his most poetic lyrics to date, as they weave across wide-open wintry landscapes.

This initially leads us to the redolent chamber-folk of “The Darkening Way” and the plaintive State River Widening-like post-pastoralism of the “Song of the Moor Fire”, which feel like the most familiar matches to the earthiest elements of The Declining Winter’s prior oeuvre. Things evolve quite differently with the elegiac eight minutes of the title track, wherein jazzy weightless drums and piano push along most of the proceedings, as if it were a lost outtake from the last two Talk Talk albums. Thereafter, Really Early, Really Late continues to enchant and inspire.

Hence, after an instrumental interlude through the Nick Drake-tinged “Yellow Fields” comes the bleak languorous Labradford-meets-Bark Psychosis airiness of “Project Row Houses”, the pulsing swirls of the Western Edges-shaded “This Heart Beats Black”, the aching Last Harbour-laced flickers of “The Fruit of the Hours”, the immersive swelling and discord of “How to be Disillusioned”, and the haunted up-close lo-fi of “…Let These Words of Love Become the Lamps That Light Your Way”.

Within that said latter closer piece, Adams near-whispers “The world is sad, we know that / But don’t be scared, there’s hope left”, to aptly sign-off an album that sublimely encases intimacy with expansiveness and melancholy with uplift. One of this year’s finest 57 musical minutes so far, without question." - Concrete Islands


"Earlier this year, a video of St. Louis reporter Kevin Killeen lamenting the month of February went viral. “February is the worst month of the year, but it’s an honest month,” Killeen declares before offering an array of darkly pithy observations. February “doesn’t hold up life any better than it really is” and is like “something great happened here but it’s over with.” Then there’s my favorite: “Something that’s been bothering you for a long time is out there… you can almost see the shape of it, when all the color is gone and life is stripped down to the starkness of February.”

Killeen’s conclusion? February is “bleak, honest, and it just tells you the way it really is.”

As someone who was born in February, and had numerous birthday parties canceled because of the month’s treacherous weather, I heartily endorse Killeen’s observations. But as someone who (A) has a perennially melancholy bent and (B) experiences a sort of reverse SAD during the bright, warm months of summer, Killeen’s observations actually capture what I love about February. The endless grey skies, bare trees, and near-constant chill can be dreary, but they’re imbued with a melancholy beauty that creates a longing for something no summer day can meet, no matter how bright and warm it might be.

In other words, February was the perfect time to begin listening to Really Early, Really Late, the latest album from Yorkshire’s The Declining Winter — and also their finest album to date. When I reviewed the album’s first single, I said the band’s music possessed an “elegant dreariness” that’s perfectly suited for the stark, tedious days between Christmas and the spring thaw. “Elegant dreariness” may sound like an oxymoron or back-handed compliment, but Richard Adams and his various collaborators really do find beauty in the doldrums through striking, even abstract natural imagery (“Song of the Moor Fire”) and the lush, slow-burning arrangements that characterize songs like “The Darkening Way,” “Project Row Houses,” and “This Heart Beats Black.”

The songs on Really Early, Really Late often follow the same pattern, with Adams plucking out a stark-yet-pastoral melody on his acoustic guitar or spinning up some gauzy, rainswept ambient drift. Additional elements are slowly woven into the songs as they unfold: plaintive string arrangements courtesy of Sarah Kemp (Brave Timbers) and Peter Hollo (Tangents); shimmering guitar filigrees from epic45’s Ben Holton; dub-influenced basslines; mournful horns, clattering and shuffling percussion; and of course, Adams’ own resigned sigh of a voice. The songs eventually achieve a sort of critical melancholy mass before fading away in a haunting fashion.

In the hands of a lesser artist, this sort of musical progression could quickly become dull and tedious, an exercise in monotonous miserablism. But Adams has been crafting this sort of music for nearly thirty years now, going all the way back to Hood’s earliest albums (e.g., 1998’s Rustic Houses Forlorn Valleys), and he’s become very, very good at it. This is particularly evident on headphones, which allow you to really enjoy the songs’ numerous layers and the intricate interlacing of their various elements — especially on the album’s longer, more expansive pieces like the title track and “How to Be Disillusioned.”

Beneath all of the sonic layers, though, is an emotional intensity that belies the music’s melancholy. On “The Darkening Way,” Adams sings of “the cold rainy moor [and] silent hills” before concluding that “I remain there still… with her” — a line that grows in significance once you know that Adams’ mother passed away last April from cancer. Otherwise mopey lyrics like “The classic reach around/The classic bringing down/Is all we know” and observations about “hopeless lives lived in silence” thus take on additional emotional clarity — and even exude a certain sense of compassion.

Really Early, Really Late ends with “…Let These Words of Love Become the Lamps That Light Your Way,” a ghostly ballad that finds Adam calmly (or maybe resignedly, or maybe both) declaring that “The world is sad/We know that/But don’t be scared/There’s hope left.” Mere miserablism this most certainly is not, even as the song fades away amidst the sounds of a thunderstorm. Rather, along with the rest of Really Early, Really Late, it’s poignant in a way that’ll put you right back into a February state of the mind regardless of the season — and I mean that in the best possible way." - Opus Zine


"Richard Adams is probably most well-known for his work with Hood, the northern English band he co-led with his brother Chris and which released a ton of post-rock-and-slowcore-indebted records in the roughly fifteen years they were actively recording. The last Hood album came out in 2005, and since then, Richard has been, if anything, even more prolific with his solo project, The Declining Winter. Not counting EPs, splits, and remix albums, I believe that Really Early, Really Late is the eighth Declining Winter record since 2008. Over three decades into making this kind of music, Adams’ new album reaches towards beauty like the best of this genre does–considering that emptiness and restraint are key factors in slowcore, Adams’ experience has likely only aided his ability to reach its heights.

Really Early, Really Late finds itself on the pastoral English, almost-folky side of slowcore, and post-rock–strings (from violinist Sarah Kemp and cellist Peter Hollo) abound–Adams cites the likes of Mark Hollis and Robert Wyatt as inspiration for the double album. Synths color the record as well–perhaps not as electronic-friendly as Hood at their most adventurous, but nor is Really Early, Really Late a Luddite album. Songs like opening duo “The Darkening Way” and “Song of the Moor Fire”, as well as “Yellow Fields”, build deliberately around acoustic, folk skeletons, while “This Heart Beats Black” gets tugged along by synths anchored by Adams’ bass playing. There are moments of (controlled chaos) in some of Really Early, Really Late’s longer numbers, but The Declining Winter build to them to the point where they’re just another piece of a larger puzzle." - Rosy Overdrive



"“… Hood is somehow intrinsically related to my childhood and my relationship with my brother and my parents and it's something we're very, very proud of, but for a long time it was mostly in the past. I see him as an old family pet that hasn't quite died, but sits half buried in my parents' garden with all the other dogs, cats, rabbits, and gerbils that have died. ” Words of Richard Vincent Adams, founder, with his brother Chris, of the Hood, a band that, between 1991 and 2005, was among the most significant and original of the English alternative music scene, thanks to an indefinable blend of post rock , folk , post-punk, electronics and experimentation. An elusive and ever-evolving band.
It's been almost eighteen years since Hood have recorded nothing, yet their memory is still vivid among those who (like me) loved them passionately.

Luckily for us, the Adams brothers have not remained idle in this long period and if Chris has followed more lateral and complex paths (especially with the Braken project), Richard, with The Declining Winter, is undoubtedly the true custodian of the Hood sound, although the musical journey of the artist born near Leeds and inextricably linked to the shady atmospheres of the English countryside and suburbs, is peculiar and decidedly unique. Now, five years after his last album, Richard is back with Really Early, Really Late , a work that represents – it should be clarified immediately – the compositional peak of The Declining Winter's artistic career.

Richard Adams has been describing his corner of the English countryside for more than thirty years, always preferring lateral paths, paths in dim light, half-hidden by vegetation and beaten by the wind. For Really Early, Really Late , he took his time, neither forcing inspiration nor rushing the recordings. He let his material settle and lovingly nurtured and nurtured his compositions for five long years, collaborating, almost always at a distance, with other musicians such as violinist Sarah Kemp (Brave Timbers), cellist Peter Hollo (Tangents), guitarist Ben Holton ( epic45 ), Keith Wallace (Loner Deluxe, Cubs), Cecilia Danell (A Lilac Decline), Gareth S. Brown (Hood), and Joel Hanson (Memory Drawings).

What resulted is a collection of absorbed songs, with dilated tempos and staid rhythms, characterized by a shy and secluded, almost withdrawn beauty. The songs, supported by a rich instrumentation that includes strings, winds, field recordings and electronics, are cloaked in sounds that move between jazzy atmospheres (the almost nine minutes of splendor of the title track ), chamber folk ( The Darkening Way ), hybridizations bucolic ( Song of the Moor Fire ), passages of dark and oblique folk ( Yellow Fields, The Fruit Of The Hours ), moments of heartbreaking emotion ( …Let These Words Of Love Become The Lamps That Light Your Way), flashes of Hoodian purity ( Project Raw Houses ), suspended and pulsating atmospheres ( This Heart Beats Black ) and restless and cathartic crescendos ( How To Be Disillusioned ).

Still centered around Adams' distinctive guitar tones and whispered vocals, and punctuated by his signature dub bass, the songs on Really Early, Really Late possess an understated, elegant sadness that perfectly suggests the mood of the English countryside nestled in the mists of a wet winter. The images evoked are those of endless gray skies, bare trees, cold sunsets, piles of dirty snow dotting the grass, but there are also more relaxed passages that bring to light "a feeling linked to childhood: the warm, welcoming and safe to be out after dark ” (to quote again the words of Adams himself).

The nearly fifty-seven minutes of Really Early, Really Late they remain suspended in a precarious balance between hope and despair (“ The world is sad, we know that / But don't be scared, there's hope left ”), lyrical inspiration and prosaic observation.

Inspired by the sounds of late Talk Talk, Robert Wyatt and the Hood of Rustic Houses, Forlorn Valleys , and inextricably linked to the remote moors and dales of Yorkshire, the album ends up being the most elaborate and accomplished of The long and fragmented discography of The Declining Winter, stimulating and complex and, at the same time, emotional and engaging.

Hood were among my greatest musical loves, and despite the prolificacy and production value of The Declining Winter, I continued to feel great nostalgia and affection for that once-in-a-lifetime band. But from today, thanks to Richard Adams and Really Early, Really Late , I feel a little less an orphan." - Triste Sunset



"Musical perception is often a question of times and contexts. Try listening to the tracks of "Really Early, Really Late" in the middle of city traffic or in the quiet of rural expanses as far as the eye can see, whose colors take shape in the light of a seasonal transition. Well, it may perhaps come as a surprise that Richard Adams' music, which has always been inspired by places very similar to the latter, goes beyond its merely descriptive sense to instead reveal aspects of alienating, romantic melancholy even detached from its original context.

All this is true as never before in the work that marks the return of The Declining Winter , after a period of unusual silence which, at least as regards the album format, lasted since the days of " Belmont Slope " (2018). The lengthy elaboration, mainly remotely, of "Really Early, Really Late" amply rewards the wait, applying itself for the density of contents and variety of collaborators to a real summation of what Adams has achieved in the now fifteen years of activity of that which undoubtedly represents the main one of the numerous artistic projects undertaken by him after the conclusion of the incredible experience of the Hoods .

And, in fact, Adams' main project for the past fifteen years now, the scant hour of duration of the new work is in all probability the most "hood-ian", in spirit more than in sounds, of his production next one. First of all, it is a long and calm album, whose predominantly meditative tones can make the songs not entirely immediate, yet immersed as never before in the misty environment of a sweetly desolate countryside, in which few but precious connections, such as those with the numerous musicians who participated in the work, from Sarah Kemp and Peter Hollo, from Ben Holton of epic45 to Keith Wallace ( Loner Deluxe ) and Cecilia Danell ( A Lilac Decline ).

On the half-light with the dilated tempos instilled since the initial "The Darkening Way", Adams and associates graft staid sound watercolors, embroidered by an unmistakable acoustic picking ("Yellow Fields"), punctuated by the surprising jazzy timbres of the title track or expanded in the form of synthetic puffs in murky transformation, such as along the ten minutes of "How To Be Disillusioned", a song that alone is worth a real manifesto of Adams' artistic career from the beginning to today. From the vaporous suspensions of "This Heart Beats Black" to the oblique folk ballad "The Fruit Of The Hours", Adams paints a sequence of impressionistic bucolic sketches, in perfect balance between contemplation and pathos, between external peace and barely dormant inner torments,Rustic Houses Forlorn Valleys ” and “The Cycle Of Days And Seasons”.

Wherever you listen to it, "Really Early, Really Late" returns precisely those rural sensations, without indulging in postcard descriptivism, but elevating them to a condition of the reflective and disenchanted spirit as never before. If it should be true that, as anticipated during the presentation, that "Really Early, Really Late" will remain Adams' last work under the denomination The Declining Winter, it would in all probability be the most articulated and exhaustive of his entire musical journey, bittersweet and sincere like a country landscape at dusk."

- Music Won't Save You (disc of the week)



"If you’re after psychedelic ambient folk, you can’t really go far wrong with The Declining Winter. For sixteen years, Richard Adams has been quietly turning out excellent albums that sit within the fertile Venn diagram between Talk Talk, Bark Psychosis, and a kind of deconstructed Bon Iver. Latest album ‘Really Early, Really Late’ is a sumptuously-rendered work, a slab of post-rock that can flit between delicate, skeletal folk instrumentals (‘Yellow Fields’), squalling slowcore (‘Project Row Houses’), and punishing ambient music (‘How To Be Disillusioned’).

The album follows a similar progression to The Caretaker’s ‘Everywhere at the End of Time’ project, or even William Basinski’s ‘Disintegration Loops’ project. Not that things get particularly degraded, but we move from clarity to a kind of broken-up bluster, a grand sweep from pastoral folk to something almost apocalyptic. Really interesting, really good. "
- Norman Records

"In 57 minutes they perform 9 misty tracks, which are in between pastoral pop, song-oriented post-rock and alt-folk. They also laye that here and there with ambient and shoegaze. Everything is provided with a thick layer of melancholy varnish, so that the songs come out beautifully. It is fodder for Hood lovers, but also for those of Piano Magic, Talk Talk, July Skies, Epic45, Tarwater and Slowdive. It is a music where spring just breaks through and you can enjoy all the subtle, budding beauty." - Subjectivisten.nl

"Somewhere in West Yorkshire where various musical ley lines intersect sit The Declining Winter with toes & studio grounding wire squished into the moist earth so as better to conduct the post rock, orchestral ambient pop, jazz vibrations & wistful folktronic energy swirling below into the unhurried, genre ambiguous gem that you hear before you. Lovely stuff." - The Slow Music Movement


"Hood brothers Chris and Richard Adams graced the University of London (ULU) stage at Terrastock 3 in the Summer of 1999. Since then they released numerous albums and singles before going on hiatus in 2007 to pursue other projects: Chris fronts Bracken and Richard has released nearly a dozen albums as The Declining Winter with an assortment of friends providing an occasional violin, cello, trumpet, guitar, and drums accompaniment. Really Early, Really Late envelops the listener in a North Yorkshire (Leeds) mist of dreamy landscapes, pastoral meanderings, and introspective ruminations. ‘The Darkening Way’ floats across the moors on sinewy violin (Sarah Kemp) with Adams’s gingerly plucked acoustic guitar and weathered voice (somewhat akin to another Terrastock veteran Alan (Kitchen Cynics) Davidson) tempered with Cecelia Denell’s soothing coos leading the way,.

‘Song Of The Moor Fire’ is equally descriptive and melancholic, a soft guitar line tiptoeing around Adams’s whispered vocals navigating James Yates’s syncopated drum fills and drifting off into a dreamy coda on the butterfly wings of Robin Smith’s wispy sax flourishes. The title track hesitatingly slips into the room with Matthew Jones-Green’s jazzy piano and Yates’s drums dipping in and out of consciousness. Ghostly whispered vocals imbue the track with a haunting aura that Adams bobs and weaves around, simultaneously dripping crystalline shards of experimental guitar a la Vini Reilly’s Durutti Column. It’s more of a mood piece than a traditional song structure, but it continues the album’s organic ambience.

Peter Hollo’s cello is at the centre of ‘Yellow Fields’ whose title is reflected in the album cover artwork - desolation, loneliness, introspective melancholia perhaps commenting on COVID-imposed isolation. ‘This Heart Beats Black’ offers ambient electronics and hesitant, spoken vocals creating a soothing dreamlike state similar to the work of another Terrastock veteran Martyn Bates (Eyeless In Gaza). The atmospheric ‘How To Be Disillusioned’ is a ten-minute exploration of inner turmoil and recuperative strength (Adams’s mum passed away last year), its ruminative first half exploding into a more experimental, the-show-must-go-on cathartic sound collage.

The album ends with the encouraging ‘….Let These Words Of Love Become The Lamps That Light Your Way.’ A sparse Kemp and Adams duet, the song is essentially a message to us all that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Yes, the current climate is cold, dark, frightening, and at times surreal but let’s not forget what brought us together and put smiles on our faces. We can get through this:

“The world is sad, we know that/But don’t be scared there’s hope left/And in the dark watch the lamp light/To help you through the dark, cold, night….” Words to live by in these insane times." - Terrascope



"For over three decades now, Richard Adams has been one of the most important voices from the U.K experimental underground. Just about every artist from the New Weird Britain movement echoes some sort of influence from Adams’ involvements in Hood and The Declining Winter. The sounds of rural psychadelia stretched and shaped into new ways, but make no mistake, Adams was at the heart of its beginnings and still remains entrenched in its presence.

Through his creative guise as The Declining Winter, Adams has never relied on past glories. Always carving out new subtle ways to make good on his talents, whether it be through a vignette of one’s past or present, the Hood co-founder has always found unique ways to crystallise the moment. Through those autumnal images and ominous, contemplative snapshots across the Pennines, no one has captured a sense of time and place quite like Adams, and as The Declining Winter, he conjures up the kind of melancholic gloomscapes that cling to your bones like a stiff January breeze.

At the time, 2015’s Home For Lost Souls was The Declining Winter’s apex moment. While follow-up, 2018’s Belmont Slope, didn’t quite emulate the emotional force of its predecessor, Adams’ latest offering, Really Early, Really Late is welcoming return to form, showcasing the same ranges of emotion and frozen obscurity we’ve all associated with The Declining Winter at one point or another.

With slight variations in tone and instrumentation, Adams begins with new ways to deliver his messages. Both opening track, The Darkening Way, and The Fruit of the Hours are nimble, with a woodsy delicacy built upon with lovely orchestral arrangements. Then there’s Really Early, Really Late’s watershed moment, which arrives in the way of penultimate track, How to be Dillusioned: a warped, dub-inspired journey shoved down the lens of post-rock. On paper these moments seem like a leap, but it’s the subtleties which make them true gold dust, whilst still sounding like archetypal The Declining Winter.

There are the moments we all expect, too. The rich atmospheres which dominate Song of the Moor Fire and Project Row House. Sun-dappled with riffs that soak up the moisture from damp northern terrains. On the latter, it’s an interesting juxtaposition, given the political connotations that some may find within the song.

The title track is one many fans of The Declining Winter will rejoice. With syncopated rhythms and a fractured improv’ jazz vibe, Adams has always held Talk Talk close to his heart, and here the beautiful ghost of Mark Hollis is ever-present.

Continuing the post-rock lineage, Yellow Fields is like fairy dust drifting from the M62 into the Moors, and while it’s purely instrumental, it still embodies the unique sound that Adams harnesses with this project. Still delicately manoeuvring, This Heart Beats Black sparks the vision of a ghost combing the same, bleak frontiers. With throbbing bass lines that almost reach into the realms of drone, Adams enmeshes pastoral psychedelia with a kraut-rock blur.

Ending with …Let These Words of Love Become the Lamps That Light Your Way (Fiona Apple-inspired?), Adams parts with a minimalist piano-led piece that is swallowed up by a crosswind of strings. As he recites from his lyric sheet in sing-speak fashion, once again a visions emerges, as Adams disappears over the peak towards the frosty, borderless terrains of his native West Yorkshire.

Like Jason Pierce, Adams’ ability to conjure up different results from the same ingredients time and time again is one of those rare feats in music. He’s done it again on Really Early, Really Late, of course. We shouldn’t be surprised, for is has become part of the act, and in a world where the value of art continues to fade and the meaning of music seems to be shrinking but for the devoted few, it’s moments like these that should be celebrated far more than they are. Perhaps it’s all about the small victories? Size aside, at least we can celebrate Really Early, Really Late, because Adams has delivered one of the finest chapters in The Declining Winter story so far." - Sun-13.com



"The Declining Winter have quietly been releasing music since 2007. Formed originally from the ashes of Leeds-based band Hood, main man Richard Adams has taken an ever-evolving musical collective and each album takes a musical starting point and extends and nurtures this. On this particular venture, Adams is joined by violinist Sarah Kemp (Brave Timbers), cellist Peter Hollo (Tangents), and guitarist Ben Holton (epic45), among many others.

Their musical palette is not dissimilar to, say, Talk Talk or Red House Painters in terms of taking a core idea, extending it, and seeing how it evolves. The band deals more with shaping “sound” and “fluidity” than attempting to work along the basis of well-trodden standard song structures. As songs develop, there’s a sense of wonder in watching layers being slowly added and progressively replaced by something else, none more so than during ‘Song Of The Moor Fire’.

The title track gets pretty close to that aforementioned Talk Talk template, particularly during that band’s latter phase with ‘Laughing Stock’. Notes performed ad-hoc over an almost-there backdrop of drums and the occasional bass. Breathy vocals and background whispers make for an earthy mixture alongside instrumentation which creates an evocative mood of walking home late at night in a city.

After multiple plays over several weeks (I was due to write this review several weeks ago, but felt that I didn’t yet know the album well enough to safely pen some thoughts… I’m still not sure I do, it’s both highly layered and nuanced – imagine being given a copy of ‘Laughing Stock’ and just a few hours to write something, it simply wouldn’t do it anything like the amount of justice it deserves), I’ve stopped obsessing about this album in terms of tracks and/or individual songs, or even attempting to break it down into smaller pieces. It’s an album which I now consider as a whole – in the same way that you wouldn’t read only only chapters 3, 7 and 9 of an Ian Rankin book, you also wouldn’t audition only selected tracks in isolation from this album either.

That we accept it as a whole work puts to bed the notion that a commercial track is parked away further along the album, as it just doesn’t work that way. Instead, we can press play and simply sit back, listening to how the music evolves and envelops us. Tracks often take time to weave their web, none more so than during ‘This Heart Beats Black’. The instrumentation is an absolute treat. Each note feels considered, even agonised over.

This isn’t an easy listen which pulls you in during its first audition, moreover it’s an album which invites you to listen a good many times before being able to reflect on what’s actually happening. Once you hit that point, it turns into the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow – but covered in an invisibility cloak which only you are aware of.

This really is some album. Five years in the making, it deserves your attention." - Sic Magazine


"An ambiguous studio hum, a strum of pastoral acoustic guitar and a hushed, mysterious lyric kick off The Darkening Way, the first song on The Declining Winter’s new album, Really Early, Really Late. It quickly develops a mood of melancholy and of shifting uneasy beauty. The Declining Winter’s songwriter and composer, Richard Adams (a founder member of Leeds indie stalwarts Hood), is happy to dwell in the most liminal of places: this makes for a music that is disquieting, unnerving, and often difficult to pin down. As well as having varied psychological effects on the listener, Adams’ music maintains interest levels by dint of its impressively wide-ranging genre fluidity. Post-rock structures are decorated by flourishes of modernist chamber music, indebted to groups like Rachel’s, or jazzier touches like the shuffling drums and licks of electric guitar at the beginning of the title track, which then morphs into something that sounds like an amalgam of Richard Youngs and Talk Talk.

The solo work of Talk Talk frontman Mark Hollis is an acknowledged influence on Adams, and the two share an innate ability to create a consistent but strange atmosphere out of a wide range of musical styles. Song Of The Moor Fire is creeping pagan-folk, awash with ambience and punctuated by impressionistic drum patterns, passages of sublime, flighty brass and squelching electronics. Yellow Fields is a bucolic, psychedelic chamber-folk gem, while This Heart Beats Black has a stretched-out post-club vibe, a kind of apocalyptic comedown.

The tone of Really Early, Really Late seems to darken as the album progresses. Wandering, sad strings give a rainy day quality to The Fruit Of The Hours, while the ten-minute How To Be Disillusioned is full of harsh chords: a bare rock of a song that somehow opens out to reveal hidden crevices. Towards the end, a propulsive drum beat kicks in, pulling the song, confusingly and thrillingly, in multiple directions at once. The final track, Let These Words Of Love Become The Lamps That Light Your Way, admits a strange and distorted kind of optimism. The melody is all the more powerful for its inscrutability: there is something familiar in the weird sounds, but they are put together in wholly surprising combinations.

There are many ways of describing The Declining Winter’s sound – haunted shoegaze, perhaps, or devotional chamber music, or ambient dream-folk – none of which do it any justice. It’s better to think of Adams’ work as an integral if obscure feature of the British musical landscape, like a stone circle hidden behind a housing estate. It’s a back catalogue that is ripe for discovery, and Really Early, Really Late is an enticing place to start: it is engrossing, sometimes playful, frequently pensive, and never less than captivating." - Folk Radio



"There are many artists, especially musicians, with a strong attachment to their roots which often contrasts with the idea of ​​having wanted or had to go and make their fortune in the capital. We are however far from the rat of the cities and the rat of the fields, especially in an England with the fierce urban concentration inherited from its industrial past even in its most remote corners. Richard Adamsnever really moved from Yorkshire. Like others, he is also attached to his land and does not care that this could have been an obstacle to the realization of his necessarily measured and modest musical aspirations. It has even become, for those who are even slightly attached to the sidelines of music (you know, holding an LP cover in their hands, scrutinizing details and notes with meticulousness, that sort of thing), a formidable ambassador through the dozens and dozens of photos that have adorned his records since Hood 's debut alongside his brother Chris . A formidable iconography that documents the towns and countryside of northern England in the manner of our ARNnational: neither overly beautiful nor outrageously ugly, the landscapes that adorn each stage of Richard Adams' now impressive discography become inseparable from his own musical identity.

The sumptuous cover of Really Early, Really Late , the new album by The Declining Winter released by local Home Assembly Music and Irish Rusted Railfor the cassette version is no exception to this rule. Even if one crosses them without stopping, the fields of ripe or already harvested wheat extend over hectares of hilly landscapes and do not retain the gaze which is lost on the horizon, at the edge of the groves or on the traditional pylons now joined, signs of the times oblige, by a few giant wind turbines. With our gaze, it's the whole spirit that lets itself be carried away by the pastoral pointillism of a Declining Winter, this time clearly becoming again a group of no less than 12 musicians surrounding at one time or another Richard Adams. Pop, folk, post-rock, jazz or a bit of all of these;

If Really Early, Really Late radiates from the first to the last note of this usual all-British melancholy when winter declines, probably rarely have we felt such a peaceful Richard Adams. There are in this new album all the signs of a personal search, this intimate way of St Jacques that others have traveled before him or still travel in search of an improbable musical outcome. Probably a shame for musicians that we readily imagine eternally dissatisfied. The adventurer in whose footsteps we slip is called here Mark Hollis , author with Talk Talk of the immeasurable Laughing Stockin 1991 and who further explored the paths to the perfect note with his self-titled solo album in 1998. Two essential beacons on the path to a certain idea of ​​perfection that Bark Psychosis or Movietone , contemporaries of Hood and on which we still meet old acquaintances like the tireless walker, Bobby Wratten now pacing the trails under the name of Lightning In A Twilight Hour or even Epic45 with a Ben Holton passing by here to share his all his experience in this beautiful quest for intimacy.

Here, as with the others, you have to take the time to read between the notes, to let them stretch out as they please, without being the least bit frightened by the silences that could interfere. Richard Adams does not fill, he clears, he prunes and, despite this plethoric entourage, never tries to pile up more than necessary. By discovering Really Early, Really Late, we are captivated by the feeling of entering a record where each element is in its place, where each note, each instrumental part stems from a carefully thought-out arrangement according to what it could bring. Quite limpidly, the record is set up around the guitar and the velvet voice of Richard Adams, generally more whispered than sung, often adapting to the peaceful rhythm of the ballad by stretching the words as grades. Sarah Kemp and her violin act as a close guard, rare almost permanent members of The Declining Winter, the group, even if, there too like the others, they know when the moment comes to fade away and leave a little room. Has a superb clarinet which illuminates the second part of aSong Of The Moor Fire yet jostled by unstructured drums; to the hammered dulcimer of friend Joel Hanson exceptionally escaped from the other group of Richard Adams, Memory Drawings on The Fruit Of The Hours close to the universe of another researcher of suspended intensity, Matt Elliott or even to an erratic piano which haunts a final …Let These Words Of Love Become The Lamps That Light Your Way as dark as its title bears hope.

Then, sometimes, the pieces lengthen and take, while remaining stripped down, a magnitude whose melodic and harmonic consistency takes the record to real heights. The very jazzy Really Early, Really Late (the title) is an abyssal dive into The Spirit of Eden such as we hadn't experienced it for a long time, free deflagration included. Lavishly beautiful, Project Row Houses is made to listen to on a summer evening, sitting in a meadow, gazing into the distance over the windswept wheat hills and the sequel to This Heart Beats Black , a track on which hovers the spirit of the last albumfrom Epic45 just becomes magic. We are then ready to face the ten minutes of How To Be Disillusioned which start slowly, very slowly on a few notes of reverberated guitars on which some majestic interlacings come to be drawn to infinity, or almost. The piece seems to end in a loop that slowly dies out when suddenly it starts up again on a rhythm that takes us from the dirt road to the railroad, a humming machine launched at full steam in the countryside of a revolution. fallen industrial of which there are still some traces that structure the landscapes as this battery structures this end of high flight.

If it happens to get lost a little in the imposing discography of Richard Adams for whom writing seems to be a vital need, it is nevertheless marked by highlights, the seminal Goodbye Minnesota , Home For Lost Souls , Belmont Slopeor now the latter which return to the “album” its original meaning, that of a collection of titles imagined, designed, recorded and assembled with the idea of ​​forming a coherent whole that tells a story. However, whether with Memory Drawing or The Declining Winter, Richard Adams has always had for all these years, in the eyes of others, to come to terms with what he was, the thinking half of a group that had become essential through the essential markers placed at the most important crossroads of music for a dozen years, at the turn of the two centuries. But here, the path that is as much musical as it is landscaped, as much spiritual as it is geographical, releasing an incredible plenitude, conveying images and intense sensations makes us want to believe that finally, with Really Early, Really Late, The Declining Winter is in a position to set an important milestone in turn that will make it much more than the group of an ex-. After sixteen years of hard work, lost songs and endless landscapes , it wouldn't be unfair; neither too early nor too late." - Sun Burns Out


"Richard Adams first recorded as part of Hood, a band formed with his brother Chris, but since 2007 his energy has mainly been directed into a series of albums as The Declining Winter. Involving a dozen other musicians in all, it is not surprising that the patiently unfolding music that composes this album has taken five years to realise. It is good to report that the effort has not been wasted although words like effort seem inappropriate, so naturally do all the parts move together even when the music is at its most complex and multi-layered.

‘The Darkening Way’ opens the record with a typically simple, appealing acoustic guitar phrase and electronic drone. When it comes in, Adams’ voice is breathy and a little shy, and benefits from the reinforcement of a female singer. Joined in turn by affecting strings, the combination with the woman’s elevated voice makes for a beautiful passage that suggests Kate Bush. Just as with the intro, so the reverbed fade is gradual, unhurried.

The interplay of two acoustic guitars lays the basis for ‘Song of the Moor Fire’. Although Adams’ voice is often hushed, here it is strangely muffled, almost as if to actualise Kevin Ayers’ ‘Song from The Bottom of a Well’, yet somehow he still conveys a feeling of anguish. Crisp, jazzy drums and a heartfelt sax complete a track that transfixes.

The title track also has something of a jazz feel, with its light touch drumming and soulful sax coda. Unintelligible voices as if heard through a wall are suddenly replaced by delicate vocals as guitar and piano build in intensity, the kind of dramatic switch that recalls Bark Psychosis.

Most of the tracks are long enough to have both substantial instrumental passages and some singing. ‘Yellow Fields’ stands out as both the sole instrumental (a blend of acoustic guitars with strings which soar and dip like a bird over those fields) and for its brevity.

A half decade in the making suggests a quest for an elusive perfection, but the mutual sensitivity of the playing on ‘Project Row Houses’, a restraint where each player of guitar, bass, piano adds only the necessary notes and no more, makes for an especially exquisite closeness to that goal, only enhanced by the sweeping in of the strings, the organ overlay and the vocals with their touching Pink Floyd-like diffidence.

Despite its grim title, ‘The Heart Beats Black’ is another engrossing song with the elements of keyboards, bass and voice treated in a different way to elsewhere. Here there are drawn-out chords, the bass ever-pulsing and the elusive vocals for once slightly more graspable, phrases like “It’s been so long”, “I’ve been so ashamed” tantalisingly suggestive. As with ‘Project Row Houses’ the musical interplay grows more entwined with the additions of trumpet, sax and guitar, but yet again this feels expressive of involved emotions rather than overloaded.

Richard Adams is said to take inspiration from rural Yorkshire, so the rippling guitar and piano of ‘The Fruit of the Hours’ might evoke for some its tumbling waters. Though there seems to be an incongruous disenchantment in the flatly sung words (“Same thing every day”), the keening strings over the piano bear away such mundane reflections.

The skilled layering of keyboards and bass almost make ‘How to Be Disillusioned’ a musical version of the fashionable ‘immersive experience’, so rich is it. Suddenly, highly rhythmic drums break in while keyboards and sax soar overhead, before a distorted chant comes in that is all but lost under the power of the drums.

‘Let These Words of Love Become the Lamps that Light Your Way’ sounds like a quotation, but doesn’t seem to be, though it has echoes in many religious traditions. There is an intriguing contrast between the stark piano, tremulous strings and sounds of wind and rain, and the comfort the words try to offer: “Don’t be scared/There’s hope left/And in the dark/Watch the lamp light/To help you through/The dark, the cold nights”. The album ends with this sentiment and an unsettling buzzing sound: there is warmth in The Declining Winter, but nothing cosy.
Quietly spectacular, almost frustratingly modest in appearance (even the credits are in small print, with no indication of who plays what), this album should be heard in any season, at any time." - Penny Black Music