“We’ve been dying to meet you,” Ben Woods sings on 'Linoleum', the second single from 'Godspeed', album number four for The Golden Dregs. This rousing greeting doubles as a mission statement for the project. What began as a solo endeavour by the then Cornwall-based multi-instrumentalist and producer has grown into a six-member ensemble, each artist deeply rooted in London’s grassroots music scene. On 'Godspeed', for the first time, each band member contributes individually, but Woods’ songwriting and resonant baritone remain at the core — an anchor welcoming listeners into the fold.

The city plays its part here. A very close ear will pick up London’s cranky ambience, recorded on a handheld recorder by synth player Davy Roderick, then woven into the songs. And where the previous The Golden Dregs record, 'On Grace & Dignity' (4AD), held up a light to and lamented a certain kind of rural experience, Godspeed turns the contrast up three or four notches above its predecessor, feeling cut through with the spirit of the city because of it. The highs are higher: a wall of sound soars more and more euphorically on penultimate track, 'The Wave'. The lows are lower: “I think I’ve had enough to last a lifetime” announces the chorus on 'The Weight of it All', a beautifully devastating homage to irreparable situations, sung by Issie Armstrong.

“People have inspired this record. To be in a densely crowded space, surrounded by strangers, and to think for a moment how every person is living out their own stories, figuring out loss and love and frustration and all the things that make up the human experience - I find that so curious. It’s a deeply personal record, but I like to think that it is personal with open arms, an experience to be shared.”

Indeed, The Golden Dregs’ songs have always been less about telling individual stories and more about narrative vignettes, snippets of images that leave the listener guessing. And although 'Godspeed' has a clear sense of character — “I came here to drink on my own, I don’t see the problem” (Heron) eerie synthesisers abounding; “maybe it’s time I was taken out to pasture / since lately I’ve been getting it wrong” ('The Company of Strangers') — this is not introspective music. It looks beyond its author and his immediate situation to something more collective.

While it continues the sonic signatures of the previous records from The Golden Dregs, Godspeed is more immediate. The hooks are constant — hear 'Perfume', 'The Company of Strangers', Stranglers-esque cut 'If You’d Seen Him' — but rarely resort to familiar tropes, leaving room for unpredictable turns. This assuredness is given further weight by the fact that Woods own label Joy of Life International, an imprint of and collaboration with End of the Road Records will release the album: a statement of independence and creative intent.

TRACK LISTING

1. Big Ideas
2 . Linoleum
3. The Company Of Strangers
4. Imagining France
5. Weight Of It All
6. Erasure
7. In The Headlights He
8. Heron
9. Perfume
10. If You'd Seen Him
11. The Wave
12. Godspeed

4AD welcomes songwriter and producer Benjamin Woods and his project, the Golden Dregs, to the roster. Hailing from Cornwall – a county in south-west England that draws thousands of tourists on holiday, and where thousands of locals could never hope of affording one – Woods grew up with a keen awareness of that gap between idealism and reality. the Golden Dregs’ third album, On Grace & Dignity, is released on 10 February 2023 and considers his home and what it means to be shaped by a place – in this instance, Truro, Cornwall’s capital, home to a rare three-spired cathedral, a peaceful river and a lot of empty shops and flimsy out-of-town housing estates. Written, recorded and produced by Woods from his South London home and childhood bedroom in Truro, it was mixed by Ali Chant (Perfume Genius, Aldous Harding) who provided additional production.

On Grace & Dignity’s origins lie in winter 2020 when Woods lost his job in lockdown and moved back to his parents’ house. The only work he could get was as a labourer on a poorly run building site on the grimmest outskirts of Truro. “It was such a bleak winter – waist-deep in mud digging holes and rolling out turf on top of building waste, really grim stuff, which became the backdrop to the stories I was trying to write,” he adds, citing Raymond Carver, Lydia Davis and Richard Hugo as influences.

In among the personal reflections on loss of innocence and inferiority, Woods spins subtly interweaving narratives about survival, desperate acts of violence, loss and the limitations of community in the face of rapacious gentrification. Nevertheless, it is, appropriately for an album about home, somewhere you’ll want to spend a while. Life here proceeds at a graceful pace grounded by Woods’s deep voice, which seems to resonate from his feet as he delivers the sort of meticulously written lunar wisdom worthy of Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, or the tidy yet revelatory koans of Silver Jews’ David Berman.

For the On Grace & Dignity artwork, he’s commissioned Bristol-based model-maker Edie Lawrence to construct an HO-scale fictional Cornish town. Christened Polgras, the 8 ft by 4 ft model features a viaduct, an estuary, a supermarket, new-build houses and industrial buildings; every song from On Grace & Dignity is represented by a scene in the town. “There’s different parts of the experience of growing up in Cornwall in there,” he says. “Some of it was from me looking at it when I was down there that winter, and some of it was me harking back to the experience of growing up there. It’s defined by that sense of duality, of coexisting realities,” he explains. “You’re geographically so far away, and it has a strong identity of its own, as well as a different landscape. It’s so rugged and bleak, but beautiful – which is what I really like in music.” 

TRACK LISTING

1- Intro
2- American Airlines
3- How It Starts
4- Before We Fell From Grace
5- Not Even The Rain
6- Eulogy
7- Josephine
8- Vista
9- Sundown Lake
10- Beyond Reasonable Doubt