Long before his critically acclaimed debut album "Origins" (2009) and its equally highly acclaimed successor "Solaria" (2012), Kevin Werdelmann alias Slowtide had already made the two demo CDs "Time Escape" (2001) and "Things That Fade". (2002) attracted attention. These early works, long out of print, were still available in the best do-it-yourself guise as blank CDs with a cover you printed out yourself.
Nine songs that were created in a simply instrumented setting in a confined space and with only a few tracks in the bedroom, but which were already confirmed in the demo columns of relevant magazines as having great potential. More than 15 years later, Kevin breathes new life into these raw demo fragments with the album "A Gentle Reminder", sometimes dressing them elegiacly with strings and grand pianos, sometimes intoxicatingly with guitars and synthesizers, sometimes not at all.
A reinterpretation of youthful ideas from a mature point of view, which one can no doubt hear as being close to the heart of the artist.
The resulting album sees itself more as a compilation, as a tour through an exhibition of stylistically divergent pictures from bygone times, and thus unabashedly pays homage to the variety of possibilities. The album starts with the fear-infused, shimmering synth-rock opener "Today", shortly afterwards it loses itself in the intimate chamber pop of "Soothing Light" in grueling melancholy, admonishes the change of perspective over a pulsating lofi drum loop in "The Shape of Things" and then sweats through the snotty '70s rock of "Get Up You're Free".
In this sense, the ambivalence is the lyrical focus: the rebellion against one's own demons and the devastating capitulation, the last chances and the eternal omissions, burgeoning hope and hopeless despair.
1.Today
2. Soothing Light
3. The Shape Of Things
4. Get Up You're Free
5.Safe
6. Halcyon Days
7. Lights
8. The Story Of Your Life
9. Fall Down
