Review Summary: An impressive feat of DIY alchemy results in 2024’s biggest hidden gem
Jacksonville, Florida’s Sam Glass has been quietly releasing albums under the moniker of The Coward Robert Ford for some 6 years now. Over 4 LPs and a handful of EPs and singles, the project has evolved from its sparse, ghostly acoustic/slowcore beginnings (
Haunter, Black Hymns), gradually incorporating more fleshed-out instrumentation and textures (
Black Manifestations, Black Masks). This latest eponymous album represents an ambitious leap forward for the project: a densely layered, diverse epic, created, as Glass puts it, “…on nothing, for nothing…on a budget of absolutely no money whatsoever, while recording on nothing but a phone.”
This DIY ethos is inspired by Have A Nice Life’s
Deathconsciousness, and Dan Barrett’s overall oeuvre (as explicitly stated in liner notes for several TCRF albums). This lineage is also immediately recognizable in the sound of the project over the years, never straying too far from the Giles Corey-to-Have A Nice Life-axis, with occasional detours into Black Wing territory. The results here are far from a pale imitation of those much beloved projects however; Glass rather seems to take them as proof-of-concept that technical limitations are irrelevant if you’ve got the vision.
Opener
The Imbecile sets the tone with a sample of a passage from
Blood Meridian, and then feeds on that energy over the course of its ten-minute runtime, patiently escalating before culminating in a squall of electric leads over a dense field of sound. There is a noticeable balance of variety and coherence; the gloomy atmosphere established at the outset is consistent throughout the record, but supplemented by flashes of color when necessary. A lot of that color comes courtesy of newcomer bassist Nick Spence, whose dynamic presence really elevates these songs with rhythmic and melodic flourishes not found on earlier records. Clocking in at almost an hour, there’s importantly a degree of variety from song to song, ranging from surprisingly hooky earworms (
Hold Still, Virgil), to an atmospheric post-punk banger (
Avarice), to relatively stripped-back spectral ballads (
No Hell, Box Truck), all bookended by seething, opaque gales of noise (
The Imbecile, Elephant).
Considering the no-budget phone recording and post-production wizardry, the final work registers to me as an impressive feat of DIY alchemy, greater than the sum of its parts by a fair margin: both a worthy descendent of one of underground music’s unlikeliest success stories as well as standing independently as an achievement all of its own. Act accordingly.
