The Shadow Ring - Hold Onto I.D. (First Time On Vinyl!) The Shadow Ring

Recorded from late 1996 through early 1997, The Shadow Ring’s fourth album marks the apogee of the trio’s experimental rock epoch — their last record clinging to their factitious bandness before they let all song and structure go awash in sonic malaise for their final run of releases on Swill Radio. The surrealist dreams of 'City Lights' and 'Put the Music in Its Coffin' give way to pseudo-expressionistic lyrics mired in the banality and bleakness of the everyday, set against the backdrop of the Coombe House (as pictured on the album’s cover). While 'Hold Onto I.D.'is the group’s most overtly autobiographical release to date, Lambkin’s lyrics obfuscate his expressionist tendencies filtering them through the codes and languages of officialdom, linking the “inner self” with documents of the state—identification cards, National Insurance numbers, and British passport numbers. While the familiar sounds of Harris’s deadpan recitation and Lambkin’s electric guitar, amateurishly strummed, dominate the album, the emotive interludes of Goss’s keyboards populate the record along with of home-cooked tape experiments and dime-store concrète.