Four years after their brilliant album ‘Fog Mountain’, Saline Grace are back with their third and latest album ‘Blacksmith’s Fire’ and an official video to their song ‘The Dream And The Wings’. Unfortunately, for family reasons co-founder and long-time bass player Ines Hoffmann could apply herself to the album and her instrument severely limited.

Four years after their brilliant album ‘Fog Mountain’, Saline Grace are back with their third and latest album ‘Blacksmith’s Fire’ and an official video to their song ‘The Dream And The Wings’. Unfortunately, for family reasons co-founder and long-time bass player Ines Hoffmann could apply herself to the album and her instrument severely limited. If ‘Fog Mountain’ was strongly dominated by mystically threatening Americana- and Psychedelic sounds, Saline Grace present sophisticated and diverse arrangements without equal on ‘Blacksmith’s Fire’ releasing a tension-filled album as if made from one piece. As on their last albums, Saline Grace place value on their familiar, almost exclusively acoustic instruments, which in their interaction, strictly renounce modern styles of music creating a sound that seems to come from between the 1950s and the 1980s.
The extraordinarily filigree, not uncommonly classical guitar techniques and fingerstyle parts, the voluminous mandolin-like ornaments and Ennio Moriccone-like twang sounds are recognisably Ricardo Hoffmann’s, who knows to create pictorial synaesthesias raising nightly panoramas from imaginatively enraptured roadmovies or the imagery of wild and near-natural sceneries. Subtly woven into a fragile sound stage, mainly consisting of piano, organ, concertina, banjo, classical string arrangements as well as its deeply resonating bass and those jazzy drums, the listener is inevitably getting entangled in a sound experience that is drawing marvellously attention to singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Ricardo Hoffmann’s emotional baritone, who is capable of mastering a falsetto, too. Hoffmann’s poetry struggles with the great issues of anthropological philosophy, where his protagonists act full of symbolism in front of surreal, near-natural sceneries. He questions the place of man in nature and the progressing estrangement in their artificial environment, their culture as well and quarrels with the all-embracing timeline in our human existence scrutinizing mankind’s forward- or backward-looking behaviour.
The new album shows Saline Grace powerful and on their highest level, performing with virtuosity, vigorous dynamics and haunting melancholy at the same time. Indeed, ‘Blacksmith’s Fire’ impresses with diversity of its arrangements, variety of vocals and its uniquely captured atmosphere, captivating the listener not only by wonderful melodies, but also by Ricardo Hoffmann’s distinctive voice, who conveys deep melancholy coupled with hidden rage, solitude and, in very few instances, hope as well.

For fans of And Also The Trees, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, The Doors, Calexico and Tindersticks