Slope EP

Tomb Land, the lo-fi folk recording project of Leeds-based songwriter Jacob Cracknell, returns with Slope, a leap across the disorienting space between grief and renewal. Folk sensibilities buried in found sound, homeward bird song and whispered conversation, The EP acts as a gentle hand leading you through the immeasurable terrain of loss to the disarming joy of new life. A passage where mourning and tenderness hum side by side, and repetition and sonic weight lighten the load of transition. “Slope marks the slow transition between the presence of someone and the thing that will eventually replace them. ”

Moulded by the manipulation and augmentation of analogue recordings, Jacob Cracknell (aka Tomb Land) furrows a route through the distortion for the beauty of life’s new beginnings. Gentle melody and sweet harmony battles the whirs and whines of a broken tape machine throughout the fleeting EP. Now on his 2nd EP via Field Work Recordings, Cracknell navigates a portal between two extremes, akin to the spicing of the camera’s film on the cover.

As if a recording meant for another’s ears, opener ‘Me, as a Song’ rests on a foundation of fidgeting ambient noise - an answer machine message with the wrong recipient. A hollow body guitar fights the crackle of cassette before hand-me-down synths rise into jubilation. ‘There are no goodbyes with Jesus Christ’ Tomb Land laments, as the shadows of loss envelop. Title track ‘Slope’ is the EP’s anchor. Written in collaboration with Joel Johnston (Far Caspian), it blurs the upward motion of grief and recovery. It ebbs and flows with a tide of resurgent sound. “There’s a line where the two meet that is hard to breach… ” Cracknell muses on the extremity of the EP’s peak.

Ultimately hope and healing are put into practice in lead single ‘Thrum’, where the ‘thrumming of the notes’ bear the burden of an ache brought through loss and longing. The contrast of the tactility of the analogue tapes and relentless compression of the drum machine lives in stark contrast to the immateriality of loss. The EP literally ends with the cassette running out in Cracknell’s machine. It splutters and withdraws from the body of work abruptly - leaving you, not without but within the comforting emptiness of the tomb land. A space to be filled.

For fans of The Microphones, Dagmar Zuniga, Kiran Leanord