The beautiful third album by the Golden Dregs, On Grace and Dignity, starts with a scene of a man going on holiday in search of his “best self”. After all, sings Benjamin Woods, “for me and me alone the sun does shine”.
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The beautiful third album by the Golden Dregs, On Grace and Dignity, starts with a scene of a man going on holiday in search of his “best self”. After all, sings Benjamin Woods, “for me and me alone the sun does shine”. Our protagonist is an exceptionalist, and perhaps a little deluded. “The song came froman observationthat life is often lived waiting for the holiday and not really enjoying the here and now,” says Benjamin. “It seems a strange pattern that we have.”Benjamin hails from Cornwall –a county where thousands of tourists flock on holiday, and thousands of locals could never hope of affording one –and so he grew up with a keen awareness of that gap between idealism and reality. Where his second album, 2019’s Hope for the Hopeless,plunged deep into personal pain, On Grace and Dignitylooks outward to consider his home and what it means to be shaped by a place –in this instance, Truro, Cornwall’s capital, home to a rare three-spired cathedral, a peaceful river and a lot of empty shops and flimsy out-of-town housing estates.In among the personal reflections on loss of innocence and inferiority, Benjamin spins subtly interweaving narratives about survival, desperate acts of violence, loss and the limitations of community in the face of rapacious gentrification. Nevertheless, it is, appropriately for an album about home, somewhere you’ll want to spend a while. (Benjamin recorded it at his place –that’s his sister Hannah on saxophone.) Life here proceeds at a graceful pace –the bass is sturdy, organs celestial, horns softly valedictory –grounded by Benjamin’s deep voice, which seems to resonate from his feet as he delivers the sort of meticulously written lunar wisdom worthy of Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, or the tidy yet revelatory koans of Silver Jews’ David Berman. “I’m no stranger to loss / And it’s hard to mistake / The hiss of an ember / As it drops on the lake,” he sings on Not Even the Rain, a mysterious vignette of two people trying to outrun their consciences.For Benjamin, the album’s origins lie in winter 2020. He had lost his job working on the bar at the Tate Modern in lockdown and moved back to his parents’ house. The only work he could get was as a labourer on a poorly run building site on the grimmest outskirts of Truro, where the ambulance sirens blare, constructing so-called affordable new-builds with workers drafted in from upcountry “who would do coke on their lunch breaks before going back to driving diggers around”, he shudders. “It was such a bleak winter –waist-deep in mud digging holes and rolling out turf on top of building waste, really grim stuff, which became the backdrop to the stories I was trying to write,” he adds, citing Raymond Carver, Lydia Davisand Richard Hugo as influences.The doleful, bittersweet HowIt Starts dwells on that period specifically, describing the houses as “brick and mortar graves” and taking an Arab Strap-worthy slump into futile violence in response. “It’s like, we’ll build theseshoddy,rushed ‘affordable’ houses but we’re not going to address the need for them,” says Benjamin. The finely turned Vista, with its filigrees of guitar and skipping bass, blithely surveys what the wanton abandon and recklessness of kids burning down a derelict house “for no reason than to see the burning world”, he sings. It was inspired by the Graham Greene short story The Destructors, and came from Benjamin’s “internalised frustration” about the housing situation at home. “I'm not going to put a brick through a window but I can do it with a song,” he says.Gentrification has swept through Cornwall at such a pace that the Falmouth garage scene Benjamin came up in –in former fish processing factories and basement speakeasies –would scarcely be able to exist now. That’s what shaped him as a musician –as a drummer first, and then a lyricist in reaction to it. “There were some great songwriters about then but the 'scene' was less emotive, less melancholic,” he says. “So when I wrote Hope for the Hopeless, which is very much a self-absorbed, introspective heartbreak album, my gut instinctwasthat it made more sense as a solo record. But it was released as an album by’TheGolden
Dregs’and was received far better than anything I’d done before, and it felt like a more genuine version of myself than trying to be a'rock band'. On a very small scale, seeing how it connects to people has been a really incredible experience.”Benjamin lives in London again now, but for the release of On Grace and Dignity, he’s commissioned Bristol-based model maker Edie Lawrence (who has worked with the likes of Idlesand Jamie T) to construct an HO-scale fictional Cornish town. It’s eight by four foot, with a viaduct, an estuary, a supermarket; new-build houses and industrial buildings. Every song on the album takes place in a scene in the town. “There’s different parts of the experience of growing up in Cornwall in there,” he says. “Some of it was from me looking at it when I was down there that winter, and some of it was me harking back to the experience of growing up there. It’s defined by that sense of duality, of coexisting realities,”he explains. “You’re geographically so far away, and it has a strong identity of its own, as well as a different landscape. It’s so rugged and bleak, but beautiful –which is what I really like in music.
