Last Mile Home

The final entry in Boden’s ‘post-oil’ trilogy is an acoustic and spare iteration of his apocalyptic themes, set against the emptying out of our everyday lives by pandemic and economic and cultural shutdown. The trilogy’s messaging regarding the climate emergency rings out like a siren in a baby’s crib. It was recorded with producer Andy Bell in a Sheffield storage unit, and its songs are drawn from an 80-mile walk Boden undertook from Sheffield to Mablethorpe on the North Sea coast. That simple act of walking becomes a Swiss army knife of a multiple metaphor, encompassing nature, pilgrimage, life’s journey, aloneness, togetherness and transience.

The sound is fairly raw and up-close, eschewing the production sheen and high concepts embedded in Songs from the Flood Plain and the carnivalesque Afterglow. In dialling down the conceptual drama, and reeling in Boden’s own walking pilgrimage as the album’s central driver, it’s the most compelling and intimate of the trilogy. Songs draw on the leys of Alfred Watkins (‘Old Straight Track’), on wild swimming (‘Cinnamon Water’), on birdsong and wild flowers, and there are guest turns from Mary Hampton, as well as compelling nature recordings made on wax cylinder – take that, vinyl heads. It has its own unique sound-world, and is a lyrically compelling journey, inside and out.