Reigns to release 4th album, give away free track
It is with enormous pleasure we announce that Reigns have a brilliant new album, ‘The Widow Blades’, which will be released worldwide the week of October 24th.
Catalog no.: Mono-49
Artist: Reigns
Title: The Widow Blades
- Tracklisting
1. Over Tone Gulley
2. Hybrium Sulphate
3. The Diagram
4. Four And A Half Minutes Missing
5. I Will Burn For This
6. Horse Murders
7. Green Butter
8. They Likes To Sleep Soft
9. Plainsong
10. Vessels
11. The Mounds
Here is a free mp3 of the track ‘The Diagram’, taken from the album. Feel free to stream, download, embed and share the link. Enjoy!
Whilst growing up in the country, Reigns Operatives A & B, from an early age became aware of the bizarre, yet inconclusive, fate of a woman from a neighbouring village. It took some years (and a great deal of wading through a seemingly endless stream of local conjecture) for them to ascertain that the woman in question was Millicent Blades: a middle-aged widow who had disappeared during the blizzard of 1978, vanishing somewhere between the villages of Tup’s Fold and Tone Gulley. Nothing was found of her save a set of interrupted footprints and a pile of clothes – all turned inside out.
The intervening years have provided much in the way of outlandish theories pertaining to her disappearance but very little in the way of answers. In a possibly futile attempt to reverse this situation and still haunted by the stories they heard as children, Operatives A & B went back to the area to document her final journey across the countryside. Using equipment selected purely on the basis of portability and resistance to the elements (with perfect synchronicity, their week of recordings coincided with the heaviest snowfall since 1978), they recorded at all the key locations that the widow visited (or is thought to have visited) on her final, fateful day: including, amongst others, her house and that of her physician, an Anderson shelter (home to a vagrant who was briefly suspected of her murder), a former tea room that she had frequented since the fifties, a disused tannery, and (for the climactic 20 minute closer, “The Mounds”) an excavated series of barrows; the approximate location of her disappearance.
The recordings proffered no conclusive answers: whether this was due to the inclemency of the weather, the passing of time and the resultant cooling of the trail, or the operatives’ disastrous decision to record the entire album under the influence of Hybrium Sulphate (a monstrously unpredictable chemical that the widow had herself been prescribed) is a moot point.
The album comes in CD and digital formats and also as a limited (250 copies) deluxe 2LP vinyl edition on 180 gm white vinyl with black splatter, which also includes a numbered A5 lino cut print hand made by the band. It also comes with a free CD of the album.
UK Press: Paddy Forwood – pad.forwood@virgin.net
Rest of Europe press by Five Roses – press@fiverosespress.net
North American press by Skyscraper – peter@skyscrapermedia.net
Operatives A & B have been quite busy the past couple of years, composing soundtracks to two BBC series on The British Family, as well as a short film.
They will be having an album launch gig on the day of release at The Social in London. You can buy tickets here.
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