Many of us can link a certain album to pivotal moments in our lives. Whether it’s the first record you bought with your own money, the chord you first learnt to play on guitar, the song that soundtracked your first kiss, the album that got you those awkward and painful pubescent years or the one that set off light bulbs in your brain and inspired you to take a big leap of faith into the unknown – music is often the catalyst for change in our lives and can even help shape who we become.
In this Love Letter To A Record series, Music Feeds asks artists to reflect on their relationship with music and share with us stories about the effect music has had on their lives.
Ffin, Delaire The Liar – The Chariot, One Wing (2012)
Dear One Wing,
I will never forget our first introduction, summer of 2013 and sat in a stranger’s, now a friend’s, back garden. After doing what was one of the worst shots of my life in the name of a ‘newcomers’ tradition’ (some bathtub distillery cherry spirit with a slug of ridiculously spicy hot sauce in it, didn’t vomit though) and crowded round a small portable speaker, comes the dulcet introduction to ‘Cheek’.
This is the first time I’d been exposed to The Chariot; this was the first time I’d heard a band fuse the, what I now understand to be seminal, impassioned speech of Charlie Chaplin’s ‘The Dictator’ over their own blend of dynamic, chaotic hardcore (although admittedly it wasn’t the last time I’d hear it done!) and it really opened the door and changed my perspective on what hardcore could actually accomplish.
Reinforced by the rest of the record, the layered harmonies of ‘Your’, the begging and screaming piano track ‘Speak’, the way the album presents itself as a cohesive body of work and the eclectic range of influences seamlessly introduced from track to track.
One Wing is in my opinion, a perfect album and holds its own as one of the most innovative hardcore records of all time.
Forget Not Your First Love. Speak In Tongues and Cheek.
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Delaire The Liar are a London-based alternative band who’ve just released their brooding new single ‘HALLOWEEN’.
“The song itself is about exhausted options, desperation and sacrifice,” the band explain. “What would you give if you’re at the end of your rope? What cost is too high to regain something you’ve lost? How far can grief push you to spend your own life in place of someone else’s. And whether you ever really valued your life at all.”
Listen below!
