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Listen: 'Atrophy' by Carpet
10 August 2022

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Leeds based musician and recording engineer Rob Slater has announced the second EP from his new project Carpet. The follow up to 2021’s self-titled debut, Carpet will release their second EP ‘Maldon Salt / Men Like Us’ on the 14th October.

A linchpin of the West Yorkshire city’s DIY scene, Slater has played in bands including Thank, Mi Mye, Post War Glamour Girls, The Spills and many more while working as a recording-engineer/producer from his own Greenmount Studios in Armley where, this year alone, his credits include Yard Act’s debut ‘The Overload’, as well as debut albums from Leeds peers Thank and Crake (with whom Slater plays drums).

After a string of releases and a period of intense work in the studio, the Wakefield-born musician has once again found time for his own songs, resulting in the understated & charming EP ‘Maldon Salt / Men Like Us’. Offering an early look at the EP, Slater has shared new single ‘Atrophy’. Much sparser and more laid-back than his debut, gone appears to be the tension of the first EP. Instead a gentle pulsing and summery guitar line lay a bed for Slater’s mellow alto.

‘Wrapping myself up in the bedsheets of the plagued’ – a practice once used by Christians in Abyssinia in order to reach heaven and eternal life - ‘I fell from my pedestal just the other day. It’s only right’ declares Slater, opening the track by mocking his own behaviour. Atrophy shows Slater almost calm in his acquiescence to the wave crushing down on him, and on all of us. Again, not apathy, but a peaceful acceptance and perhaps even optimism can be heard in the refrain ‘Maybe this is all gonna solve something we don’t know at all, and maybe all this dust is golden’.


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The wave finally hits in a beautifully shambolic flurry of pianos and guitars, as Slater allows himself to be immersed in strings for the final line ‘Masterpieces crumble from my wall/A great atrophy of nothing much at all’. The strings then carry us away, before finally all that is left is a spacey Roland String chord, which too eventually meets its abrupt end.



Carpet Dates:

20/08 - Fast & Bulbous Festival, The New Adelphi Club, Hull (solo)
01/09 - The Establishment, Wakefield‬ (Headline show)
‪01/10 - Westgarth Social Club, Middlesbrough‬ (w/ Mi Mye)
‪02/10 - The New Adelphi Club, Hull (w/ Mi Mye)
‪10/10 - The Brudenell Social Club, Leeds (w/ Mi Mye)
12/10 - The Library Pub, Oxford (w/ Mi Mye)
14/10 - The Elmers Arms, Bristol (w/ Mi Mye)
  author: CHRISTOPHER NOSNIBOR 10 August 2022