The Golden Dregs pens an upside-down love letter to home with On Grace & Dignity

One of those millions was songwriter Benjamin Woods, the mind behind the smoky barroom chords of The Golden Dregs, who found himself rolling turf across building waste just outside Truro, Cornwall in deep winter 2020. Waist deep in mud during the coldest months of the year and living back with his parents is when Woods admits, The Golden Dregs’ third album On Grace & Dignity finally came together, forming into a body of work resembling the Cornish village he’d come to refamiliarise with.

Woods returns to the theme of death throughout Grace & Dignity, alongside life itself in its purest forms and complexities. From digging holes within “Josephine”, to going on holiday searching for an ideal self on “American Airlines”. On Grace & Dignity finds The Golden Dregs’ multiple narratives coexisting in the same space. Through “American Airlines” Wood’s baritone remarks make sense of daily death tolls and newspaper horoscopes while encapsulating the escapism of a flight over a beat that gently skips along the unconscious of its subject matter. The soaring closing lyric “In a Boeing jet of silver blue / coasting on desire lines” sees Woods quieten with each “going” before one final “gone” makes a hole in the sky.

Gentrification-themed “How It Starts” unmasks Cornwall’s struggles to fill houses with worthy tenants, picturing rows of second homes, wealthy incomers and tarmac roads paved for cars that won’t drive them, the song’s stand-out moment a closing dark truth in “our currency is greed.”

While “Sundown Lake” lends itself to an upbeat, tonal warmth, its lyrical topic appears bleak, Woods searching for hope wherever he may find it. Hannah Woods’ – Benjamin’s sister – also provides soaring saxophone for “Before We Fell From Grace”, while his baritone vocals create a steady bed for this chamber pop outing.

In its complete form, On Grace & Dignity, the band’s first release since signing to label 4AD (home to The Pixies and Scott Walker), is very much an upside-down love letter to the idyllic location of Truro. Woods having lost his job at the Tate Modern, finds every part of town a new scene to an already unruly stage play, “Do you feel the places we go are unreal / Outside of the moment like a scene from a film,” “Beyond Reasonable Doubt” opens. The slow continued pace, and almost slog of the record encapsulates a universal grieving.