Album Review Blaenavon - demoitis

Blaenavon’s Ben Gregory released ‘demoitis’, a collection of 12 songs recorded over the past year, as a surprise present to fans on Christmas Day and, having openly and admirably addressed his ongoing mental health problems on October’s second full-length LP ‘Everything That Makes You Happy’, these songs act as a companion piece. While that album dealt with a young man feeling that he was degenerating to the borders of sanity, ‘demoitis’ deals with his tentative recovery. The upbeat tone of a song like ‘multiple + personality + disorder = friends for life’ suggests that while the narrator isn’t fully back to his old self, he’s well on the way, and though many of the tracks - such as ‘Michael’, featuring Francis Lung - are stripped-down, intimate torch-songs, they rarely sound dejected or negative. Winter can be a triggering time for people dealing with mental health issues and, as such, it’s laudable that Ben released these songs when he did; ‘demoitis’ acts as a way of letting listeners who are similarly affected know that things can get better.