The Durutti Column :: Renascent

The Durutti Column return without pretending that what was lost can be restored. Renascent survives through guitar, cable, room, van, and the hands willing to carry the music across the gap.

Renascent was built across a few metres of Manchester: Vini Reilly in his kitchen, Keir Stewart at a desk in the back of a parked van, the guitar signal travelling the few metres between them. After Reilly’s strokes, years of isolation and sixteen years without a new Durutti Column record, that small physical gap had hardened into something like geography.

The title invites the word “return”, and that reading is tempting. But this is not restoration. It is relay. The old conditions could not be recovered, so a new apparatus was built around what remained: Stewart’s production, Bruce Mitchell’s percussion, guest voices, a domestic recording system improvised out of necessity.

The opener, “Echoes in the Memory”, sets the terms in eighty seconds: guitar phrases surfacing through reverb, hesitating, withdrawing before they resolve. What arrives is memory abraded rather than returned whole — static, drift, interrupted contour. “Time Present and Time Past” extends that logic across six minutes, circling rather than developing, allowing earlier phrases to bleed into later ones until chronology begins to loosen.

The record’s two vocal tracks, “Liars” and “Scammer”, form its true centre of gravity. Reilly does not sing with polish, and the songs would lose something if he did. His unschooled, half-hidden voice puts breath back into a house that otherwise sounds vacated. It sits unevenly inside the music, fragile in pitch and timing, yet the unevenness becomes evidence: somebody is still there.

Caoilfhionn Rose’s appearances are less consistent. “Agonistes” earns its beauty because it remains under tension, her voice held inside an arrangement that never quite settles beneath it. “Sargasso Sea” is the one place where the record over-irons itself. The piano and vocal arrangement settle too readily around the guitar, closing the harmonic space before Reilly’s hesitations can disturb it. The song arrives too cleanly resolved, smoothing the very irregularity that makes his playing worth hearing.

“Your Shadow at Evening” briefly opens another route through the record. Its low electronic pulse establishes a grid that Reilly repeatedly declines to inhabit. The guitar crosses the beat obliquely, occasionally coinciding with it before slipping loose again. What matters here is less the contrast between old and new production languages than the refusal of one to correct the timing of the other.

Elsewhere, Bruce Mitchell’s percussion works less as groove than as metrical punctuation. He marks out intervals for Reilly rather than fastening him to the bar, leaving the guitar free to shorten a phrase, hesitate over it, or arrive fractionally outside the expected beat. The old lightness is still audible, but its timing now carries effort: silence has entered the phrasing as something structural.

The closer, “For Friends Everywhere”, rebuilds “For Belgian Friends” from 1980 as a chamber piece, with strings, clarinet and horn gathered around its old melodic armature. Rather than preserving the piece in glass, the arrangement lets other instruments enter its structure, extending the melody through a different collective body.

The change in title, from a place to “everywhere”, says the thing plainly. A piece survives by passing through other hands.

Renascent is not a comeback record pretending that nothing happened. It is what remains standing after loss, put back together by people willing to work at the scale of a kitchen, a parked car and a length of cable laid between them. Its modest scale is the form the music had to take. Nothing here needs gilding.