TVAM: Ruins
(Invada Records)
Vinyl | DL available at Sister Ray
Released 27 February
4.5 out of 5.0 stars
TVAM (Joe Oxley) is back with another mind bending album three years after the excellent High Art Lite. It’s another lesson in clever psych electronica that flirts with genres like never before, cementing his place as the warped wizard of Wigan. Wayne AF Carey reviews…
The album origins explained:
TVAM returns with his new album, Ruins, the follow-up to High Art Lite, Ruins is an album shaped by grief, reflection, and transformation; a record that captures both the weight of loss and the strange beauty that comes with it. Written after a self-imposed break from songwriting, it represents a shift in focus and perspective for Joseph Oxley.
“I wanted to step away from what I thought I was supposed to make,” he explains. “The worst advice anyone can give you is, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ It’s always broken. It always needs fixing.”
At its core, Ruins explores loss not as emptiness but as presence, something that reshapes the world around you. The album finds Oxley wrestling with the dualities of human experience: the tension between what’s said and unsaid, between humanism and nihilism, public and private, despair and acceptance.
“Hope and despair don’t cancel each other out,” he says. “They can co-exist — that’s what makes it feel real.”
This is a thrilling ride of wonderful noise from the start. Going back to his early days Comfort Collar emphasises his love of old film soundtracks, a synth laden warped number of dark foreboding with a claustrophobic feel of gothic sound. The Gloom continues with a dark wobbly undergrowth and psychedelia drenched vocals over a crunchy trip hop beat layered with stuttering guitar soundscapes. The Words picks up the pace slightly with a crunchy industrial drumbeat, indie guitar riff and a great vocal chorus that recalls the best of shoegaze from the nineties. Catchy as hell with a Ride like feel is how I’d describe it.
Real Life goes into synth cinematic mode again with a moody drum line and vocals that flirt with early New Order and Depeche Mode, yet always belongs to TVAM in his own right. Darkly drenched with psychedelic tendencies and a dreamlike state of trance. Powder Blue is excellent stuff, swamped deep in darkwave electronica, a great guitar riff and some monstrous keyboard all overflowing with echoing vocals and some great little breaks. Well worth the three year wait. Follow Me Home is an electro house eery bastard with it’s repetitive chants of ‘follow me home’ and a hark back to Joey Beltram and Adonis. Chilling.
Winter Rose is a slight nod to a more upbeat Mogwai with warped bending keyboards from the world of nightmares. It’s unsettling stuff that works, especially with the dirty guitar riff backed by TVAM’s now signature sound of innovative psych soundtrack electronica. In Memory is a one minute interlude of acoustic guitar backed with heavenly synths that fade in and out before the majesty of Love Like Glue. Another nod to New Order’s sound and a funky floor filler that takes you right back to those glory days of clever Eighties New Wave. His love of all things synth shines like a glowing diamond and is a testament to the skills of the one man creator that’s Joe Oxley.
Sweetness & Light is a two and a half minute opus of prog psych with an ode to the likes of Spiritualized and the early origins of trip hop. Easy and eerie on the ears, drenched in echo. Closing track The Haunted is fucking haunting. Five minutes of unsettling horror soundtrack stuff taking you down a dark tunnel into a unknown sense of unease before you shit your pants. As dark as dark can be that gets the hair raised and the sweat pouring from your head. It’s a journey into your psyche that thrills yet unnerves you at the same time.
Easily his best album yet and proof that soundtrack music still has the power to drag you in and keep you hooked with the twists and turns of one man, a guitar and his machine. A thrill of a ride and a modern piece of gothic art to keep you entertained for the next three years…
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Words by Wayne Carey, Reviews Editor for Louder Than War. His author profile is here
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