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Review: 'Tiger Lillies, The'
'Cold Night In Soho'   

-  Album: 'Cold Night In Soho' -  Label: 'Misery Guts Music'
-  Genre: 'Folk' -  Release Date: '26th January 2017'

Our Rating:
With a crackled, grainy, smoky and deeply soulful voice quavering tales of fire and brimstone over dolorous piano and wandering upright bass, this is intense. And it’s only the first track. ‘Cold Night in Soho’ isn’t exactly a concept album, but it is an album which explores a theme, a time, a place. Namely, Soho, before it was subjected to the gentrification which has remodelled not only much London but many corners of many cities across the UK. And whatever is gained by such changes, inevitably something is lost. In sweeping away the grit and the grime, she scum and the dirt – literal and metaphorical – the ingrained character of a place is stripped out and polished off. While the moneyed businessmen and hipsters descend, the impoverished inhabitants of before re displaced, and with them, the culture – however low-brow, however grim – is shunted on or crushed beneath the wheels of so-called progress.

‘Cold Night in Soho’ is a scrapbook of memories which captures the spirit of old Soho, with its sex shops and dive bars, druggies and drunks. ‘there was risk, excitement and colour here, in all its gaudy and unexpected variety. All gone now, the frisson clinically ironed out, blandness installed.’ Kicking out the trash: sex shops, book shops, record shops, anything interesting or useful is closed down, the space redeveloped and reopened as another Starbucks, another Urban Outfitters, another Wetherspoons, another hipsterish ‘entrepreneur’ serving exorbitantly-priced craft beer and artisanal food served smugly on a slate or a chopping board.

‘Dancefloor’ is a seedy, swampy vaudeville stomp which depicts booze-fuelled punch-ups and ‘Just Another Day’ is a tender, sad piano ballad. The range of the album conveys the diversity of the inhabitants and their (counter)cultures, the glorious mess that is the underbelly of human existence, and at its best, captures the human carnival as represented by the seedy, run-down corners of cities in a work which is the musical equivalent of Henry Miller at his sharpest.

‘Cold Night In Soho’ is tinged with sadness and a deep sense of loss, a mourning of a kind of live that has been painted over and lost. But it’s also a celebration of a time and a space when life was more real, and a spirit that will forever live on.

The Tiger Lillies Online



  author: Christopher Nosnibor

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Tiger Lillies, The - Cold Night In Soho