On his fifth album 'Soil Creatures', Grand Salvo (aka Paddy Mann) finds beauty in the smallest of things, writes SHAUN PRESCOTT.

Where does a songwriter turn once they’ve wrested from their psyche a concept grappled with for years? Paddy Mann’s last album Death was a work that gestated over a five-year period. Soil Creatures, on the other hand, has followed relatively quickly, is not beholden to any conceptual thread and is overall a more delicate and intimate affair. To say it’s better than Death would be facile, but it suffices to say that Mann is still as faultless a songwriter and lyricist as you could hope for. Here his craft is more affecting than ever.

Listening to Grand Salvo is like plundering a chest of faded photographs and mourning relatives you never knew well enough. These songs are awash in a calm tide of not unpleasant sadness; a meditative, incidental exchange with a stranger that’s imbued with an inexplicable depth. More than anything, the 10 short songs that make up Soil Creatures just make you want to live – smell the spring, ride a bike, hug a loved one.

Soil Creatures is so effortlessly sentimental that it could possibly decipher many of life’s cruel complexities. It’s in the way incidental portraiture expands under the grace of Mann’s wise, paternalistic delivery, such as during ‘Needles’, which proffers an expanse of homely imagery culminating in the realisation that everything ought to be savoured for its possible meaning – even rusted needles in a lidless tin.

“The 10 short songs that make up 'Soil Creatures' just make you want to live – smell the spring, ride a bike, hug a loved one.”

It’s this profundity-through-incidentals that drives Soil Creatures. With song-titles like ‘Chimney’, ‘Road’ and ‘Flowers’ it seems that Mann is fascinated by the meaning we deposit into the least suspecting targets - the beauty that longstanding associations can foster in the smallest of things. But just when the free-association threatens to become too easy, Mann hits us with a track like ‘Brother’, a quietly devastating account of one form of love smiting another. In this instance, a sibling falls to his death from a landscape etched affectionately into the witness’s mind. It’s a moment when the heart needs to be quickly and brutally re-orientated, and Mann captures that clash of passions perfectly.

The cover art for Soil Creatures is emblazoned with the remains of long dead creatures; feathers and bones and other remaining artefacts torn from their lively context and rendered as decorative icons. It indicates that Mann perhaps hasn’t cut ties with his fixation upon death, and maybe he never will. But in contrast with its predecessor, Soil Creatures is a celebration of life, an attempt to shuffle clues into workable constellations of sense and association, and it’s an album that is as assuring as it is sometimes alarming. It’s a work to be pored over and understood.

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Soil Creatures is out now through Preservation.