It goes on aching deep and lingering in The Agoraphobia Files of Purbeck Temple-- a pain that drips underneath your skin, and will sink there and remain silent but persistent. It is as entering a sealed room full of the echoes of survival and every echo has its stories that are too massive to leave behind. The album has come into being as a result of the almost terminal beating of Paul Gill - broken bones, infected, agoraphobic, and long-suffering he is - but what he is bringing to life in the silence of his bedroom studio in a small village in England is something that has a purpose. His voice, his gravelly, human voice swings in pain and prayer. Such transitions draw you near in songs such as No Hard Feelings and Emptiness in Paradise, engulfing you into the nakedness of solitude. When listening you cannot but feel your own secret scars rattling in response.
The music is deframed, or more precisely, stripped naked, tunes without ornamentation, breath lines. There is no nonsense, only the truth. In other songs such as the Anger and Religion, that simplicity is strength and the vulnerability is turned into something courageous. The drum beat sounds like a heartbeat that is struggling with panic, and the stressed guitar riffs slice across the haze--all music proclaims their endurance. You are able to sense the constraints of his home studio not as limitations but as personality. Every flaw has a burden, every trial is a witness to perseverance. It is not merely an album it is a document of survival, with each note rising against dizziness and pain and even the ghosts of fear, with all that and the quiet support of his family humming in the background like a life-line.
Their themes are like scars, coming back to traumas and recovery, anger mixed with belief, that vacuum lurking behind the placid faces. Humor shines even in the most negative sides, it is a survival strategy that is adoringly human. No Hard Feelings is a mix of heartbreak and irony, and one giggles and feels his heart. At the end of the day listens, the songs such as Emptiness in Paradise and Anger and Religion are like confessions spoken in the dark - unedited, heartfelt and too much true. It is therapy music, making personal traumas a group concern, a reminder that sound can find where words fail.
This is not a musician in a mission to get famous; it is a man giving something back - songs fashioned of survival and sewed together with time and integrity. The Agoraphobia Files was originally a single song, composed upon leaving the hospital, but it ended up being much more than that: a bridge between the silent realms between us. Hearing the entire album is like holding Paul by the hand and spanning that distance - it is an understanding that the process of healing does not follow a straight path, yet it is possible. The introduction of Purbeck Temple is not noisy but it lives. The weakness is our strength here, and opening his world, Paul Gill assists us in opening our own. It stays, it assures, it makes you remember that music, at least in its finest form, does not simply perform its functions, it cures.
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