Adam Craddock sleeps in a candy floss coffin that converts into a gaming chair. He guzzles mead as best he can whilst making haunting, break-beat shouting songs. He makes so many too! He’s always letting people listen to them, like he has allowed people to listen to this song. You don’t know how lucky you’ve got it!
Thousands of years ago whilst Adam was still in his infancy as a God, he picked up a guitar and set about to make music. He has gone by many names and faces over those years. Bach, Prince, Adam Levine. Now he goes by Silver Linings though, and it’s his best project yet.
Each track he has released so far has been a testament to his ability to create genuinely weird music that feels out of place everywhere (except, of course, in my heart). While it is his latest single, ‘Hollow Man’, that is the title of this review, I’ll do a quick run down of a few other recent Silver Linings tracks, as over the past few months he’s been dropping plenty of other exciting tunes (hopefully a build to a bigger release in the future?).
‘Okko’ is a relentless, disorientating track. Its brutal vocals and drums are paired with much quieter, haunting passages in between. Towards the end, it’s the perfect example of the techier side of Silver Linings. ‘Bitter Break-Up’ is almost danceable. It’s oddly a bit of a romp and weirdly catchy, for fans of Show Me The Body for sure.
‘Nice-Slo Death’ is morbid and unforgiving. There’s moments in here that could be Deftones. I always have a soft spot for tracks like this where the screamier parts are aggressive but reserved for the background, and the more uncomfortable part is somehow the softer, more frontal vocals. ‘All My Life’ starts with the lyric “All my life/Been wasting time”. They’re some of his most intelligible lyrics and also, fittingly, some of his most bitingly honest.
And then finally there is the track in question, Silver Linings latest song, ‘Hollow Man’. I felt when listening to it like there was definitely some Radiohead influence, but of course, the drum machine comes in and it instantly becomes a part of the weird and wonderful world of Silver Linings. It also features a beautiful bit of animation, also done by Adam, as do all of these songs. When listening to the songs back to back, his world-building ability is impressive. Not just because of the shared art style, but all the tracks fit well together as companion pieces, with ‘Hollow Man’ being his most emotional and moving song yet.
Silver Linings will be supporting Lydia Lunch & Mark Hurtado playing the music of Suicide and Alan Vega at Future Yard on the 12th November.
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