Following the successful release of the Green Rock River Band’s first album, ‘Rhinoceros’ (8/10 Americana UK, “Quite Extraordinary”, Mike Harding, BBC Radio 2 & Mike Harding Folk Show) the band became very much in demand. They scored the feature length soundtrack to British apocalyptic comedy, The Fitzroy, and helped the film pick up two awards at SXSW festival in Austin Texas. They toured regional theatres across the UK and enjoyed radio play throughout Europe, the US and locally in the UK. They cemented their place as one of the UK’s leading Alt-Folk, Country bands.
In 2017 however, they took a step back. They took time to reflect on the environment around them, taking in the musical, political and social landscape, channelling their observations and emotions into new song-writing and arrangements. This new perspective is reflected in their latest musical offering, Edgelands.
Green Rock River Band's second album, Edgelands, takes its inspiration from the unloved, in-between and forgotten spaces on the edges of cities; the bit of scrap land by the side of the ring road or behind the out-of-town shopping centre. Folk and country music often taps into a sense of freedom offered by the open road and the wide expanses of the open plains, but these are not landscapes the band grew up in or occupy in our modern world. The edgeland places are a very British, suburban kind of wilderness.
The album explores different characters as they pass through these places, like the young children in the song ‘Kevin, King of the Edgelands,’ two pre-teens who see the edgelands as their kingdom, ruling with a feral solidarity built out of friendship and abandoned radiator parts. Or the narrator in ‘Hard Times’ who through poor circumstance has travelled through the edgelands and found themselves on the edge of the world, with nothing left but to throw rocks at the sea. ‘I Loved This City’ tells the familiar tale of how these spaces expand and grow, as cities engulf more and more land to accommodate the need for a place to call home.
While these modern parables show us an unsettling and bleak scene, ‘Infinite Possibilities’ celebrates the startling beauty that can be found in the forgotten corners of wasteland. With the right mixture of night time, isolation and service station strip lighting, the edgelands can be as reverent as a cathedral or old theatre. The track, ‘Brockwell Park’, is an instrumental that invites the listener to celebrate these spaces where communities cross over and socialise. The final track ‘Tomorrow’ brings the album to a close, with a look to the future, it is a gentle, yet furious call to arms, to create a world with enough compassion to fill the deepest and darkest corner of this urban to rural wasteland.
Web : www.greenrockriverband.com
Facebook: Green Rock River Band
Twitter: @TheGRRB
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