Reviews
Saint Senara Album: Dark Water EP
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 5
Website: https://saintsenaraband.com/
How well do we know the people who live right next to us? For some of us, a cheery good morning greeting is often the closest we get. Of course that is not everyone's experience, and sometimes those that start off as neighbours end up becoming a highly rated duo that were named Gloucestershire's best band of 2023. Ok, so maybe that's not a universal experience either, but serendipity strikes where serendipity strikes and having a singer-songwriter and a poet separated by some bricks was clearly too much to resist.
Dark Water is their third release, and it had to live up to, after their first two EPs gained them critical acclaim and a lot of fans. Fortunately, not only does it live up to very high expectations, but frankly it leaps over that bar with a lot of room to spare. There are only three songs on the release, though we do get two live versions here as well, with the five presented in palindromic form. The one downside to such a release is that it under-stays it's welcome by a long way.
The bookend track, There's A Storm Coming is a great track to open, and indeed close, the EP. It's darkly gothic but with more than a hint of Fleetwood Mac style accessibility. The production values fool you into thinking there's far more being thrown at the song then there actually is, with the beat coming not from a guitar, but from a variety of imaginative effects. Across this song and the excellent Lost Lisa Marie, they utilise guitar cases, chains, studio shutters, Indian bells, and even a castanet, just to get the beat going from anything but a drum.
Perhaps surprisingly, all this invention adds a lot of depth to the mix, creating a soundscape that feels expansive without losing sight of the fact that this is a duo with a guitar and a tambourine. On Ophelia this is especially evident, as they strip everything back to basics with just the vocals and the guitar, creating an intimate and deeply poetic track which is devastatingly raw and vulnerable.
In just a few short months, Dark Water is surely destined to feature heavily on a lot of lists as one of the best EPs of 2025. These five tracks, even with the two live repeats, have more impact than many full length albums. Andrew Bate and Chloe Gorman are clearly on an upward trajectory, and very little is going to get in there way. Hopefully their future might just feature a longer release too.
Adam Jenkins
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