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On a first listen, this debut solo album from The Pineapple Thief mainman is a delicate, sensitive, mostly acoustic glide. Pleasant enough, but hardly worth another glance. But something draws you back in, and once you strip away the soft-focus surface, what’s exposed is altogether denser and darker.

Because Soord has come up with an album of songs with depth and imagination, and which are uncomfortably clever. The insistent, piano-led chime on Black Smoke slowly drawls into the dusky embrace of Buried Here. A Thousand Daggers stabs with the eeriness of the Twin Peaks theme, while Familiar Patterns has an agitatedly sedate gait as it offers a disturbed ambience.

Soord exposes the flimsiness of nostalgia on songs inspired by his own life experiences. At turns he both wallows in the memories while using the songs as a cathartic exercise. In the process he’s created something remarkable.

Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term "thrash metal" while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021.