Atom Grad

'Gone to Ground' is to all intents and purposes an 'Emo' album, full of melodic and emotive songs with expressive lyrics that reflect on personal relationships, encounters, and above all, narratives of experience of what life can be beyond early experiences of love, loss, infatuation and obsession. The music itself is very cinematic and textural, in that it conjures up fictional film scenes where the environment, landscape and mood are as important as the subjects described within it. In some ways it is a musical version of a David Lynch vision of the world, strange, dark foreboding scenes in lost hotels and places where perhaps obsessive and irredeemable encounters occur. Some of the songs describe the dynamics of a relationship in what seems like real time. With planes, trains and foreign cities being witnesses to describe an encounter or a parting where the author reflects and tells a story on what is happening and what has just happened. There is an overwhelming feeling of personal emotional experience and intensity in the lyrics, some may find this too confessional, but all the themes that are explored are universal experiences that will resonate with many, the song line 'we've all been here before' (track 3: 'Hotel Vitrine') sums this up, a familiarity of experience for those who, as Alain de Botton describes, have 'walked the wilder shores of desire and obsession'. 'Vitrine' means glass case from the French 'glass pane', and indeed this album offers the listener and spectator a view into a world where everything is transparent and nothing is the least bit prosaic or mundane.