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Wilderness End is the debut album from Bearpark, a new solo project from multi-instrumentalist Nicholas Hirst. Nicholas borrowed the name Bearpark from a remote village near Ushaw Moor, County Durham, home to his late Grandad. 'It's a quiet, windy place between moorland and collieries, where miners were born and no-one goes - it seemed strangely fitting.' The songs on Wilderness End document a turbulent decade through the eyes of a rural Essex boy colliding with the glittering noise of London. 'This is mostly an album about the things we do when we're kettled in together, all doing our best and trying be happy. I think we are wild animals at heart, not designed to live in cities. But live in them we do, with strange consequences. There are unrequited love songs, songs about depression, songs about lashing out, looking out and the changes to ourselves that we don't even notice until we try to return home.' It blends the pastoral, hymnal Americana of The Low Anthem, Bon Iver or Wilco with the distorted romanticism of Ed Harcourt and Sharon Van Etten. There are touches of colliery brass and the sad synthiness of Radiohead and John Grant, all held together by a deep love of words. Produced by Dave Moore (Revere, Polly Paulusma, The Laurel Collective), the songs were recorded everywhere from a flat in Brixton to analogue wonderland Urchin Studios in London Fields (which houses an amazing 19th century pedal organ used on album tracks Turn Around Take a Bow and Little Black Holes). Nicholas Hirst is a London-based multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter. He has spent most of the last few years playing with London band Revere and Scottish-born singer-songwriter Kat Flint (to whom he is also married). He was born in Essex and grew up between Colchester and Detroit, and now lives in Brixton, London.
This is a gem of an album, as fresh today as when I heard it a year ago. The generous 14-track collection opens strongly with “Boxers”, a song that quickly establishes Nicholas Hirst aka Bearpark as a considerable wordsmith with a paralleled keen ear for melody. A gentle acoustic intro hardly prepares you for Hirst’s self-deprecating opening line: “So there I am, a grin, a posture, and a lie”. Smacked in the eye by unexpected love and reeling like a boxer leads to the realisation that “a day that’s spent without you is a waste – a waste and a shame”. Voiced with passion, it’s a brilliantly real and visceral song that sets a particularly high water mark.Thankfully there is plenty more where “Boxers” leaves off. “All Fall By”, which follows it, picks up pace with piano, bass and drums over a cleanly picked acoustic guitar theme as Hirst plays poetically with the notion of the significance of dreams leading to carpe diem resolutions. He brings in synth and programmed effects to accent dramatic moments and resolves the song in a flurry of fluttering notes over an insistent drone. Vocally Hirst’s earnest yet approachable tenor stretches to falsetto and is coloured with inflections of dialect betraying his Essex roots and more recently, cosmopolitan London life. A notable feature of Hirst’s songwriting is that he largely eschews the conventional verse-verse-chorus and end-of-line rhyming structure for a writing style more rooted in prose that still fits seamlessly with the music. He tells a story cleverly using internal rhymes and fits it all to song in a strikingly original fashion. Many songs are steeped in the folk tradition although Hirst introduces little twists to the mix like the barrel-house piano on the wistful “What Are We Going To Do?” or the machine-like percussive effects in the muted “Not So Tired”. When he plays it straighter on, say, the gentle “Sleeper Train” the results are equally appealing.Some songs stand out for sheer atmosphere. The darkly imagined “Crows” is structured like a traditional ballad with each verse unveiling signs of unnerving depression, for once lifted, but with an inescapable, tragic denouement. Once more Hirst ratchets up the tension with subtle instrumental changes. There are echoes of Hirst’s parent band, Revere, in the mournful brass arrangement that decorates the tender “Little Black Holes” and in the epic, defiant sprawl of “Turn Around, Take a Bow”. The hymnal quality of Hirst’s songs hits something of a peak in “Battle Hymn for the Republic” with its graphic imagery suggestive of a hollow post-war peace.Nicholas Hirst took the name Bearpark from the village home of his grandfather in North-East England which he describes as ‘a quiet, windy place between moorland and collieries, where miners were born and no-one goes’. The final song, “Distant Fields” takes up this theme of disconnection; in this sense Hirst’s own ambivalence towards living in London where “it locks us there in bright despair with its little golden hooks” when your heart might be elsewhere: “We’ll live and breathe in distant fields”. It is a fitting conclusion to a record that represents a journey of the heart and the mind. Meanwhile should you ever need a reminder of the power of music to move and inspire, you’ll find it in “Wilderness End”.
