Humanist On The Edge Of A Lost And Lonely World (CD)

On the Edge of a Lost and Lonely World, the second album from Rob Marshall’s Humanist project, showcases the vocal talents of a number of iconic artists. This choice cast navigate a masterful expansion of the Humanist sound-world, broadening and deepening the terrain first explored on 2020’s much lauded debut album, further consolidating the emergence of Rob Marshall (guitarist of Exit Calm and co-writer of Mark Lanegan’s celebrated Gargoyle and Somebody’s Knocking albums) as a songwriter, composer and producer with a singular musical vision.The album is a reminder of how emotionally affecting guitar-driven music can be at its best: soaring, turbulent, soul-searching, and above all sincere; you can hear that Rob’s been through it all, wears the scars to prove it, and has come through wiser, more experienced and resilient. An artist of the old romantic school, it’s obvious that Rob means it. On this second Humanist album, it feels like the stakes are high: here’s one man’s soul, painstakingly laid bare.Though On the Edge of a Lost and Lonely World has all the gothic industrial foreboding of Humanist’s debut, the palette has broadened to take in more light and shade, expanding to include the feathery guitar washes welded onto driving motorik rock’n’roll, contrasted with the sweetness and light of Isobel Campbell’s exquisite “Love You More”, which takes you back to peak My Bloody Valentine at their most shimmering and ethereal. Guitars glide and glisten above the rumble and churn like the drama of the weather in Rob’s adopted home of Hastings, dark clouds rolling in off the English channel heavy and grey, shot through with peach and crimson, little England battered by dayglo rainclouds at sunset, like we’ve all been over the last few years. On this second Humanist album, Rob has emerged as a master of such subtle, delicate textures, gossamer-fine filigrees of guitar lines, electronically treated until you can’t be sure if it’s guitars or the ethereal beating of wings.