The Salt Collective – A Brief History Of Blindness (Propeller) (13th Floor Album Review)
Power-pop supergroup The Salt Collective are due to release their sophomore album A Brief History of Blindness this week. With as many special guests on this release as there are tracks (if not more), you’ll hear collaborated guitar pop songs on here that might just give you a familiar taste of days come before.
If you’ve not heard of them before, and I am REALLY simplifying this here, SALT (or The Salt Collective) are the brainchild of songwriter Stéphane Schück. As the name suggests, they are a collective revolving door of musicians that you could spend hours poring over Wikipedia articles to find what they may have featured in (and trust me, I did).
Unlike their last release (2023’s Life), they’ve opted for a core band, with guests joining in for vocals, instrumentation and a song writing credit or two. Yep, you’ll see a lot of ‘featuring’ attached to each track. I was provided with a ten-paragraph press release to accompany my listen. I’ll save you reading eight hundred and thirty-seven words and try to summarise it here for you.
You’ll hear the bass player from R.E.M (Mike Mills), the lead singer from Nada Surf (Matthew Caws), a guy who produced a lot of R.E.M and jangle-pop records (Mitch Easter), the guy who wrote Walking on Sunshine (Kimberley Rew), Andy Partridge (the from XTC) and singer-songwriter Aimee Mann.
Oh, and there a number of other musicians who you may know, or (like me) may wish to research in further detail; Jason Falkner, Lynn Blakey, Djángo Haskins, Faith Jones, and who could forget Chris Stamey?
But, enough of the name dropping. What is the album like?
It’s well thought out, but fairly generic 90s pop-rock music. And, if you think about the folk that are on this album (and the time when they found their fame), it’s not at all unsurprising. I don’t think they’ve intentionally tried to give this love-letter-to-when-music-was-awesome vibe, but that’s what I walked away with.
In saying that, the musicianship is spot-on and I think they’ve benefited from using a core band to accompany (my apologies for not including them in my list, because they are quite a notable part of the album!). Despite being simple guitar rock, there’s a lot of cool guitar lines, and orchestration included. A flute ensemble to close The Waiting Game was a nice touch.
Each guest steps up to the microphone with confidence and heart. However, I didn’t find that many of the performances gave attitude or vulnerability (two things I seem to gravitate towards in vocal execution). How We Breathe was the standout hook of the album for me.
The issue I have with this album is how insipid I found it. It’s not catchy enough to be a pop album, yet it’s not quirky enough to be an indie or alternative release. Perhaps if I had fond memories of this big-list-of-who’s-who on A Brief History of Blindness, I might have felt more inclined to be more positive. But honestly, it didn’t really excite me much at all.
If any of the names bolded in this review excite you in any shape or form, I would recommend giving A Brief History of Blindness a go. With a wide range of guest musicians, The Salt Collective does manage to give a consistent performance on one LP without sporadically changing vibes between each track.
Daniel Edmonds
A Brief History Of Blindness is due out Nov. 21st on Propeller
