Depeche Mode's Dave Gahan on new Humanist album
The new record with the shared song will be released on July 26, 2024.The new record by British guitarist Rob Marshall, better known as Humanist, will be released on July 26th and is called “On The Edge Of A Lost And Lonely World”. fans should also Depeche Mode be happy about this news. Dave Gahan will be taking over the vocals on the song “Brother”.
Here is the entire tracklist of the album:1. The Beginning (feat. Carl Hancock Rux) 02:57
2. Happy (feat. Ed Harcourt)
3. Too Many Rivals (feat. Tim Smith) 03:45
4. The Immortal (feat. Ed Harcourt)
5. This Holding Pattern (feat. James Cox)
6. Brother (feat. Dave Gahan)
7. Born To Be (feat. Peter Hayes)
8. Keep Me Safe (feat. Rachel Fannan)
9. Dark Side Of Your Window (feat. James Allan)
10. Love You More (feat. Isobel Campbell)
11. Lonely Night (feat. Madman Butterfly)
12. The Presence Of Haman (feat. Madman Butterfly)
13. The End (feat. Madman Butterfly)
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.
The first Humanist album was a swirling Niagara of fuzzed-out melody and noise, visceral, cinematic, mesmerising, a big, triumphant album featuring vocal contributions from Mark Lanegan, Dave Gahan (Depeche Mode), Mark Gardener (Ride) and Joel Cadbury (UNKLE), among others. A soaring record of huge ambition, it was Rob’s first solo project after his band Exit Calm split, and also the first record he’d ever fully produced. It was both a showcase and a powerhouse, and it sounded like Rob could smell victory. But just as his masterwork was ready to go, Covid stopped everything dead in its tracks, a promotional tour was cancelled, and the world sank into a long limbo...
It must’ve been a bitter pill to swallow, everything stopping just as it was about to get started. Soul destroying, even. The anguish and frustration is palpable on the new album, agonisingly articulated in “Holding Pattern” (featuring James Cox on vocals), the sound of a man banging his head against a brick wall, or the cocoon-like state lamented in “The Immortal” (Ed Hardcourt on vocals), curled up foetus-like, locked in the heart of the solitude of lockdown, wasted days “curled like a child in the seed.”
Not long after the limbo of lockdown, the untimely death of Rob’s key collaborator Mark Lanegan, with whom he shared a deep and ongoing musical friendship, came as a tragic blow. Rob wrote and produced six tunes for Mark on their first collaboration together, the much-celebrated album Gargoyle (2017 Heavenly Records). Mark’s next album ‘Somebody’s Knocking’ (Heavenly Records October 2019) featured six more co-writes from Rob. The first tracks they ever worked on together were included on the first Humanist album.
As painful as they are, such sojourns into the wilderness can heighten and hone the artistic instinct and emerging from the cocoon so painfully delineated in “The Immortal,” Rob has gone back to the source, and drawn deeper from the well. The new album explores and develops themes pondered on his debut - existential questions of life, death, purpose, hope, suffering, redemption - but now with a deeper palette of sounds and emotions, more nuance, a growing mastery of the form, producing a record of emotional subtlety, depth and scope.
Rob’s vocals, as Madman Butterfly, are all to be found in the increasing abstraction of the second half of the album, with conventional song structures dissolving into tone-poems, til they hang suspended on a viola note, only to rise once more into vast elegiac expanses conjured by ethereal, fuzzed out guitar treatments, Rob’s voice singing half-remembered melodies from a dream going round and round your mind in an indefinite soulful yearning on final track “The End”, waking up from a dream of it all so meaningful and strange it can’t translate into the waking world, and collapses on contact with reality, slipping like sand through your fingers...
“My head’s away in clouds of thoughts and imagination,” Rob muses, “but I’m driven to be as real and authentic as I possibly can musically, trying to push forward and harness all I’ve got; it was never really a choice, but the only thing I ever felt I could do - to swim with the tide, accept your fate, ride the waves. I’m a shy person but on stage my guitar leads me to a place of innate confidence, so I guess that’s where I’m most comfortable”.
releases July 26, 2024
On The Edge Of A Lost And Lonely World is the sophomore album from Humanist, the moniker of frequent Mark Lanegan collaborator Rob Marshall
The album features an array of guests including Depeche Mode's Dave Gahan, Midlake's Tim Smith, Isobel Campbell, and Ed Harcourt, amongst others.
Commenting on the album, Marshall says... "During a time when the world seemed to teeter off its axis, and I grappled with personal illness and losses, music became my lifeline once more. Like a soothing medication, each note and lyric offered a glimmer of hope in the midst of darkness. Collaborating on the tracks felt like a shared journey through the universal language of music, allowing me to find my voice amidst the chaos. The title, On The Edge Of A Lost And Lonely World, felt deeply fitting then and continues to resonate now, embodying the essence of this profound musical exploration. I truly believe this album represents my finest work yet, a testament to resilience and the power of art to illuminate even the darkest of times."
Tracks:
LP
The Beginning ft Carl Hancock Rux / Too Many Rivals ft Tim Smith / The Immortal ft Ed Harcourt / This Holding Pattern ft James Cox / Brother ft Dave Gahan / Born To Be ft Peter Hayes / Keep Me Safe ft Rachel Fannan / Dark Side Of Your Window ft James Allan / Love You More ft Isobel Campbell / The End ft Madman Butterfly
CD
The Beginning (My God) feat. Carl Hancock Rux / Happy feat. Ed Harcourt / Too Many Rivals feat. Tim Smith / The Immortal feat. Ed Harcourt / This Holding Pattern feat. James Cox / Brother feat. Dave Gahan / Born To Be feat. Peter Hayes / Keep Me Safe feat Rachel Fannan / Dark Side Of Your Window feat. James Allan / Love You More feat. Isobel Campbell / Lonely Night feat. Madman Butterfly / The Presence Of Haman feat. Madman Butterfly / The End feat. Madman Butterfly