Soft Top – Your Aching Words

Brighton’s Soft Top open a new conceptual chapter with “Your Aching Words”, out February 13 via Crafting Room Recordings. Songwriter Miles Goodall has built the project around a seven-piece band — Austin Pritchard on guitar, Charlie Bogg on bass, Owen Bullock on drums, Bobby Smyth on clarinet/synth/saxophone, Oakley Flavell on cello, with Goodall on keys and lead vocals — and the lineup shows in how the track is constructed. Orchestral flourishes, vocal harmonies, and chamber-pop precision that sits somewhere between Andy Shauf, Matt Maltese and Steely Dan.

The track serves as a prologue to a larger conceptual work about life, death, and the space in between. It follows a character hit by a car on the way to a house party, set in the moments just before and during the accident — told from a perspective that doesn’t yet know what’s happening. Underneath that runs a lover’s quarrel: the pain of seeing someone with another person, building toward a fourth-wall-breaking confession at the end. “The track ends with a soliloquy-esque fourth wall breaking confession to the lost love”, Goodall says. It’s a lot to carry in one song, and it pulls it off.

The production came together in two stages: a three-day tracking session at Brighton Electric for the bare bones, then Smyth’s bedroom studio — and a small space he was renting in Portslade — for the orchestral overdubs and harmonies. “Bobby produces a lot of the Brighton music scene and with the addition of Oakley’s cello we were blessed with a great team around the songs”, Goodall says. Mixed by Bobby Smyth, mastered by Corin Robinson, artwork by June Isemene.

Soft Top have shared stages with George Bloomfield, Honeyglaze and Jaakko Eino Kalevi, and picked up early support from BBC Radio 6 and BBC Introducing Sussex. Goodall also organises Mumfest, an annual Brighton music festival raising money for the Clatterbridge Cancer Unit — it raised over £1,600 in its first year.