Alabaster DePlume - Come With Fierce Grace. LP
In what's been shaping up to be a truly historic run of creative output amidst a seemingly endless live schedule... the Mancunian troubadour Alabaster DePlume returns with a new album of mostly instrumental material... Open, honest, and true... these merely lightly-fined by-products of collectivist compositional process are from now-legendary sessions at Total Refreshment Centre, and they are titled Come With Fierce Grace.
Come With Fierce Grace is an album made of authentic and unstipulated – yet welcomed – human interaction. It is for the most part an album of instrumentals, with exception of a few vocal features by Momoko Gill, Falle Nioke, and Donna Thompson. However the instrumentals on this album are much more embryonic and unfiltered than the lush orchestrations heard on Alabaster’s beloved 2020 album To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1.
Come With Fierce Grace is perhaps the most raw and candid portrait of Alabaster’s creative compositional process we’ve yet to hear, as he’s captured vividly in the room with his collaborators – stretching, exploring, working to deepen and expand the emotions underlying his melodic and poetic frameworks. Regarding the process, Alabaster cites a similarity to how elements in nature contribute to shared work and beauty without a collective motive – a bee’s own motives result in the delivery of pollen. As he says: “The great thing wants to happen, let us allow it to happen.”
Regarding the origin of the album’s name: On his first trip to perform in the US in March 2022, Alabaster collected messages from individuals, as he asked them if there is anything they would like him to share with his audiences. One message (from a person who preferred to remain anonymous) asked Alabaster to encourage people to “come with fierce grace.”
Track Listing
A1 Sibomandi [Feat – Falle Nioke]
A2 What Can It Take
A3 To That Voice And Say
A4 Greek Honey Slick [Feat. Tom Skinner]
A5 Give Me Away
A6 Fall On Flowers
B1 Did You Know [Feat. MettaShiba, Momoko Gill]
B2 Levels of Human
B3 Not Even Sobbing
B4 The Best Thing In The World
B5 Naked Like Water [Feat. Donna Thompson
B6 Broken Again
