Led by brothers Simon (singer) and Justin (guitarist) Jones, from the idyllic village of Inkberrow in the fields east of Worcester, from the very beginning And Also The Trees was Gothic the way only a rural English band could be: a pastoral Gothicism of sentient landscapes and dark implications – rather than bloodied-teeth-and-dyed-black-hair, AATT was summer-dress-snagged-on-a-thorn-bush-its-wearer-ominously-absent.īy the time of ‘Gone … Like the Swallows’ from 1986’s Virus Meadow, the essentials of the AATT aesthetic were fully formed: ethereal, enveloping mandolin-style tremolo guitar over a punchy, punctuating rhythm section, topped with Simon Jones’ sing-spoken, image-laden poetics. The band’s 1983 debut single ‘Shantell’ rang with flanged 4AD guitars and ooh-spooky synths, but there was something more than that, too: an atmosphere more Wuthering Heights than Release the Bats. These are the scenes we are offered – a hunter defies his better nature, ‘looking out across the wastelands’ a couple lies entwined, sculpted, sleeping, acquiescent a man awakens to the harsh cry of urban reality as well as a glimpse of redemption.įor more than 30 years the Worcestershire-born band And Also The Trees has ploughed a singular furrow in the well-worn and oft-maligned field of ‘Gothic’ rock. It presents a landscape in which the sea is as deadly in its calm as its torrent, the world swirling around in ecstatic terror while we are enveloped in a kind of eerie stasis, watched but motionless. Born Into the Waves is a series of offerings, not of events of settings, not actions.
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