After the first single “The Beginning (My God)”, today Humanist announces the release of On The edge of a lost and lonely world Available July 26th through Bella Union.
The recording alias of multi-instrumentalist Rob Marshall, Humanist's second album features guest appearances from an all-star cast of vocal talent including Dave Gahan (Depeche Mode), Tim Smith (Harp), Isobel Campbell, Ed Harcourt, James Allan ( Glasgow). , Peter Hayes (Black Rebel Motorcycle Club), Carl Hancox Rux and more. To accompany the announcement, Humanist has shared a video for new single “Too Many Rivals” featuring Tim Smith. Watch it BELOW:
Commenting on the track, Rob Marshall says: “Tim's voice has always had a profound effect on me. In 'Too Many Rivals' he awakens emotions that are at once familiar but strangely unfamiliar. With this piece, Tim goes deep and evokes a mix of tragedy, comfort, and hope. It is a masterful performance where his melody intertwines perfectly with my music. It’s a collaboration I’m really proud of.”
Additionally, following Humanist's recent European tour with Depeche Mode, Marshall and his band will support Jane's Addiction on their UK tour next month (dates below:
Monday, May 27 – London – Roundhouse
Wednesday, May 29 – London – Roundhouse
Friday 31 May – Glasgow – Barrowland
Sunday June 2 – Manchester – O2 Apollo
On the edge of a lost and lonely world, The second album from Rob Marshall's Humanist project showcases the vocal talents of several iconic artists. This select cast navigates a masterful expansion of the humanist soundworld, broadening and deepening the terrain first explored on the highly praised 2020 debut album, further cementing the emergence of Rob Marshall (guitarist of Exit Calm and co-writer of the celebrated Gargoyle and Somebody's Knocking albums) as a songwriter, composer and producer with a singular musical vision.
The album is a reminder of how emotionally impactful guitar-based music can be at its best: soaring, turbulent, introspective and, above all, sincere; You can hear that Rob has been through it all, has the scars to prove it, and has come out wiser, more experienced, and more resilient. As an old school romantic artist, it's obvious that Rob means business. On this second Humanist album, there seems to be a lot at stake: here is a man's soul, painstakingly laid bare.
Although On the edge of a lost and lonely world has all the industrial gothic foreboding of Humanist's debut, the palette has been expanded to encompass more light and shadow, expanding to include the light washes of guitar welded to the driving rock'n'roll, contrasted with the sweetness and light of the exquisite ” by Isobel Campbell. Love You More”, which takes you back to peak My Bloody Valentine at its brightest and most ethereal. The guitars glide and shimmer above the din and sway like the weather drama in Hastings, Rob's adopted home, dark clouds rolling in from the English Channel, heavy and gray, speckled with peaches and crimson, the little England hit by daytime evening rain clouds as we have all been in recent years. On this second Humanist album, Rob has emerged as a master of such subtle and delicate textures, fine filigrees of guitar lines, treated electronically until you can't be sure if they're guitars or the ethereal flapping of wings.
Humanist's first album was a swirling Niagara of fuzzy melodies and noises, visceral, cinematic, fascinating, a big, triumphant album with vocal contributions from Mark Lanegan, Dave Gahan (Depeche Mode), Mark Gardener (Ride) and Joel Cadbury (UNKLE). ), among others. A dizzying and ambitious album, it was Rob's first solo project after his band Exit Calm broke up, and also the first album that he produced in its entirety. It was both a showcase and a powerhouse, and it looked like Rob could smell victory. But just as his masterpiece was ready to be published, Covid stopped everything in its tracks, a promotional tour was canceled and the world sank into a long limbo…
It must have been a bitter pill to swallow, everything stopped just as it was about to begin. It even destroys the soul. The anguish and frustration are palpable on the new album, articulated agonizingly in “Holding Pattern” (with James Cox on vocals), the sound of a man banging his head against a brick wall or the lamented cocoon state in “The Immortal (Ed Hardcourt on vocals), curled up like a fetus, locked in the heart of the loneliness of confinement, wasted days “curled like a child in the seed.”
Not long into lockdown limbo, the untimely death of Rob's key collaborator Mark Lanegan, with whom he shared a deep and continuing musical friendship, was a tragic blow. Rob wrote and produced six songs for Mark on their first collaboration together, the highly celebrated album Gargoyle (2017 Heavenly Records). Mark's next album, 'Somebody's Knocking' (Heavenly Records, October 2019), featured six more co-writes from Rob. The first tracks they worked on together were included on Humanist's first album.
Painful as they may be, such sojourns in nature can enhance and hone the artistic instinct, and by emerging from the cocoon so painfully outlined in “The Immortal,” Rob has returned to the source and dived deeper into the well. The new album explores and develops themes reflected on their debut (existential questions about life, death, purpose, hope, suffering and redemption), but now with a deeper palette of sounds and emotions, more nuances, a increasing mastery of form, producing a record of emotional subtlety, depth and scope.
Rob's voice, like Madman Butterfly, is found in the increasing abstraction of the album's second half, with conventional song structures dissolving into tone poems, until suspended on a viola note, then rising once again. in vast elegiac expanses evoked by fuzzy, ethereal guitar treatments, Rob's voice singing half-remembered melodies of a dream going round and round in your mind in an indefinite poignant longing on the final song “The End”, waking from a dream in the one where everything is so significant. and strange, it cannot be translated into the waking world, and collapses upon contact with reality, slipping like sand between your fingers…
“My head is wrapped in clouds of thoughts and imagination.” Rob reflects: “but I'm driven to be as real and authentic as possible musically, trying to move forward and take advantage of everything I have; It was never really a choice, but rather the only thing I felt I could do: swim with the tide, accept your destiny, ride the waves. “I'm a shy person but on stage my guitar takes me to a place of innate confidence, so I guess that's where I feel most comfortable.”
On The Edge Of A Lost And Lonely World Artwork and Tracklist:
1. The Beginning (OMG) with Carl Hancock Rux
2. Happy with Ed Harcourt
3. Too many rivals with Tim Smith
4. The Immortal with Ed Harcourt
5. This holding pattern with James Cox
6. Brother with Dave Gahan
7. Born to Be with Peter Hayes
8. Keep Me Safe with Rachel Fannan
9. The Dark Side of Your Window with James Allan
10. I love you more with Isobel Campbell
11. Lonely Night with Madman Butterfly
12. The presence of Haman and Madman Butterfly
13. The end with Madman Butterfly
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