Tom Wiggins, Letter Carver & Writer

I was introduced to Slow Club near the end of 2014 while training as a stonemason at Bath College.  I liked them, but it wasn't love at first listen.  I remember watching  Gareth from The Office star in one of their music videos  and being as underwhelmed by it as he was by his ride on the Ferris wheel.  ‘Giving up on Love’ is early Slow Club and I sort of liked it, but at the time it sounded like a song I'd hear on an advert containing twenty-somethings pretending to be teenagers as they got ready for a night out.  It was a song I'd enjoy while the advert lasted but one that I would fail to look up.  But I stuck with them because the friend who provided the introduction also liked Joanna Newsom - and us Newsom fans have to stick together. The song featured on ‘Yeah So’, Slow Club’s 2009 debut album, but a cutesy advert-friendly band they were not.   They weren’t about to let the end of the decade swallow them up.   They were in the proc...

It is Bank Holiday Monday morning and as I write this, a cover of Future Islands’ ‘Seasons (Waiting on You)’ is playing on repeat on my laptop.  “Seasons change and I try hard just to soften you.”  It’s something about the rhythm of that line that keeps me returning to it.  It might be how it forms a metrical palindrome in the way the stresses fall.  I imagine a mirror, or pivot, between ‘try’ and ‘hard’, and a great blossoming from its centre, rather than from left to right.  Its content adds emotion to its appeal, but its structure has a symmetry and simplicity that’s as pure and as honest as a blush.    It is one of the most beautiful first lines in music and it is being sung by Rebecca Taylor of Slow Club.  The song is a tapestry rich with feeling that Slow Club delicately weave their own brand of richness through. The Future Islands original was the soundtrack to last June’s family trip to Gdansk in Poland and I am transport...

Excitement is steadily building for Slow Club's appearance at Gloucester Guildhall on Thursday 26th January.  I was introduced to them by a friend at stone masonry college last year, but it was only recently that I've started to listen to Complete Surrender, their latest album.   I bought a ticket for myself and my friend Simon (of Glass Walking Stick fame) even before I knew whether or not he could go. This post is in part an appetiser for him, although it might have the opposite effect if he doesn't like their sound.   Although it isn't even afforded a title on the album and is put at the end of it almost as an afterthought, it's sung with poignancy and real heart and I think it's close to the record's finest.