Album Review: Grand Salvo - Slay Me In My Sleep

Grand Salvo – aka Paddy Mann –has always refrained from travelling down the beaten path, preferring instead to carve his tales of whimsy and woe out of much finer, eclectic stuff. On Slay Me In My Sleep, his sixth foray as Grand Salvo, Mann relocated to Berlin and enlisted the duties of acclaimed composer Nils Frahm for production duties (and a smattering of piano and celeste) alongside a plethora of bit players on this overtly ambitious album.

Kicking off with the pagan carnival-esque instrumental The Old Woman And The Boy, it takes no time to disappear down Mann's rabbit hole. The song titles are ridiculously verbose (one of the shortest being They Sit Facing Each Other At The Kitchen Table. He Notices She Is Missing A Finger), but reads as the chapters of a beguiling folk tale set in France of the meeting of a woman and a young man as he burgles her house in May 1928. Really.

The bewitching Mann weaves a tapestry of subtlety and beauty around this highly evocative concept, a suite of songs coming forth that embrace the listener warmly rather than hold at bay. There is inherent in this album the sense that Mann intends this to be a bedtime story, to be told in a wind and snow-swept house by candlelight. It's difficult to highlight any one song, because alone they feel just that – alone, out of place. The fact that Mann has the audacity to make such an album is one thing; the fact that he has made a grandiose, majestic folk epic with all the emotional toil of a classic novel, is nigh on revelatory.