BRUCE SOORD

All This Will Be Yours KSCOPE

Life, death, fatherhood – it’s all here on Soord’s superior second solo LP.

Bruce Soord’s second solo album comes four years after his self-titled debut, and just 12 months after Dissolution became The Pineapple Thief’s first UK Top 40 entry. There’s inevitable crossover between his two musical incarnations, but All This Will Be Yours puts clear blue water between them. Under his own name, Soord dials down the overdrive and amps up the melancholy further, his brittle, emotional voice resting on delicately insistent acoustic guitars and glacial electronic textures.

Once again he finds inspiration in his hometown of Yeovil, Somerset, and the recent birth of his third child. The finest piece on the album, the bitter title track reflects on a walk with her through their austerity-stricken local area. Pushing past a local drug den at Number 158 and the ‘Incarcerated humans contemplating just what’s left to do,’ Soord asks: ‘Have we come too far to fall upon our knees?’ A rare, desperate slide guitar solo and wailing police sirens (recorded locally) ram the bleak picture home.

Another highlight, the minimal You Hear The Voices builds into a crescendo of analogue synths, filtered and layered, with the tune collapsing into thrilling dissonance. A gentle xylophone adds to the tense pulse of Our Gravest Threat Apart along with guitar harmonics and huge, echoing keyboard textures. In this splintering UK there’s broader social context to the line: ‘We are a beautiful force together, our greatest threat apart/We know nothing is forever, but it’s too soon to come apart.’

This theme of impermanence, of mortality, recurs throughout, from the opener The Secrets I Know (‘Move forward at all costs, I’m already mourning your loss’) to the consoling yet devastating goodbye, One Day I Will Leave You. By comparison lead track The Solitary Path Of A Convicted Man is a catchy number. Complete with subtle marimba and the cheeky clack of processed maracas, its relatively linear structure is a welcome breather from the album’s gloomy, minor-key feel.

If Soord’s writing and performance remain top-flight, his production and engineering skills power up by the record.

All This Will Be Yours is a masterclass in modern sound work and timbre. His precision of, say, the tear-jerking Time Does Not Exist, overly maudlin Cut The Flowers and loping One Misstep hark back to one of his heroes, Alan Parsons. Credit’s also due to fellow Pineapple Thief Steve Kitch for his sensitive mastering job.

Ruminating on his own circumstances, Soord articulates and mollifies our own thoughts and fears about life, death, and the world’s entropic slide towards ruin. All This Will Be Yours proves again that he’s got the heart of a poet and ears of gold.

SOORD ARTICULATES AND MOLLIFIES OUR OWN THOUGHTS AND FEARS.