WL//WH Video Of The Day SOFT TOP
Rising from Brighton’s ever-fertile creative underground, Soft Top announces their debut album, “Gathering Dust’, due for release on 19th June via cult imprint Crafting Room Recordings (ELLiS D, Ideal Living), alongside the release of a new single, “Paving Stones”, paired with an animated video created by Kamran Kuar.
Across the full span of “Gathering Dust”, founder Miles Goodall (keys, lead vocals) utilizes the ensemble’s, comprising Tinman’s Austin Pritchard (Guitar/Backing Vocals), Bobby Smyth (Clarinet /Synth /Saxophone /Backing Vocals), Hutch and Sad Dads’ Charlie Bogg (Bass/Backing Vocals), Oakley Flavell (Cello), and Hutch and Sad Dads’ Owen Bullock (Drums), orchestral breadth to transform the album’s concept into a vivid, widescreen dreamscape. While the subject matter flows between heavy themes, the arrangements remain lush and buoyant, ensuring the record never sinks into melodrama.
“Gathering Dust” is a strange, shimmering beauty; pairing the harmonic complexity of 70s jazz-pop with a raw, modern vulnerability that feels strikingly personal.
A rich, swanky, colorful electro-acoustic cross-breeding of jazzy fusion groove, soul reverie, pop palpitations and velvety classical orchestrations that concur with each other, balancing in immaculate harmony, to caress Steely Dan’s melodic refinements and the Style Council’s slinky blue-eyed soul glint.
As feathery and fluid, as well as thrilling and charming, grounded on understated, easy-going drum patterns and warm rubbery bass lines, the song stirs a seamlessly lush and vibrant intoxicating wax and wane of gracefully dallying piano melodies, pulsing brassy swells, fluting spirals, poignant crystalline guitars and a transformative array of emotional orchestral textures, to gently sway atop atmospheric soulful male vocals, airily radiating with a smooth and lively calm yet thoughtful mood.
Simple, fanciful, and symbolic, the animated visuals by Kamran Kuar tell the tale of a person who gets hit by a car while walking to a neighbor’s house. After the accident, his ghost falls through a crack in the pavement and becomes part of a groovy psychedelic subterranean world where dragons fly, and serpents turn into blossoming flowers. Unfortunately, a devil eats him, and he is left floating, surrounded by kaleidoscopic configurations and colorless entities, in the belly of the beast.
Keep Up With: Soft Top
