Abstract Concrete release the upcoming debut album" Guilty Buildings"

Guilty Buildings is the second album from Abstract Concrete.

Imagination and communication, intense playing and emotional connection, pushing at new ideas and attitudes with momentum, rhythm and big tunes; human music making. With a raw sound dealing primarily in forward pulse, the six songs on Guilty Buildings take a slow arc across the strange now and possible futures. The evolving mood moves through questions more than answers with concentrated lyrics and a persistent physicality making a fugitive sense of urgency. Recorded in Charles Hayward’s underground studio in amongst visual artists at Lewisham Arthouse and mixed at producer/engineer Nathan Greywater’s Listening Ear just off Deptford High Street, Guilty Buildings’ grows out of South London everyday life and noise, adding to a long history of outsider sound from origin punk through drum ‘n’ bass to the prolific D.I.Y. scene.

Guilty Buildings is a deliberate sequence, switching narrative positions from song to song, a strategy to keep the listener present and alert. Set inside an imaginative and muscular soundworld the lyrics continue Hayward’s thematic obsessions that run from This Heat to the present day inhabiting a specific sense of song space where language contradicts and refracts, leaving the listener to resolve meaning. Songs speak to other songs across time. More questions than answers. This record is not an easy ride.

Here’s a track by track run down:

Subject. Verb. Object. This song deals with the what/why/who of songs, how much is the singer the song, how much is the song about the singer? Does the singer have to be a nice person? Where does a song end? Language as real estate, a way of claiming territory and holding reality in place since forever.

Small World. This tune is a pop song that has found its own shape; it’s about small moments that swivel other events around them. Things change, meanwhile, inside, below the surface, chaos and order are in love, time goes slow/fast/slow, sudden edits left right and centre. Chance encounters, the space between circumstance and decision.

Subconscious Cage. Everywhere surveillance like we are all criminals waiting to happen. Smile. Everywhere superficiality and nonsense. Inconveniently convenient. Smile. Feedback loop, hypnotised. Inside out and wrong way round. Smile. Hypnotised, feedback loop.

Big Ben. Something about the sins of the father. Whitehall, guilty buildings, rooftops of London. Take your time.

You Will Be Happy. A shiny and frictionless future that no-one can argue awaits us, what’s not to like? A lullaby of coercive control from the cradle to the grave. Do not worry, you will be happy, go to sleep now. You Will Be Happy was constructed around a little keyboard with built-in drum machine and is the only track on the album to use machine time at its core, reflecting the clock as subliminal control technique and setting the song in contrast.

Body & The Buildings is from the gut, lungs and spine, like a body without overthinking. Some sort of remedy away from language, from the ground up, back into the body. Belly button. The voice bypasses the brain and lets the torso do the talking. A wonky funk drums up a slippery sliding urban landscape of dancing skyscrapers, grinning statues and tourist attractions as the album fades into our future.

Enjoy your listen, and let me know if you need any extra assistance from me or if you need a Promotional CD for review or airplay.

TRACKLISTING

01. Subject. Verb. Object.

02. Small World

03. Subconscious Cage

04. Big Ben

05. You Will Be Happy

06. Body & The Buildings