Wolfgang Webb’s “The Lost Boy” arrived not so much as a collection of tracks, but as a sonic correspondence from a place where streetlights hum with Kraftwerk’s ghost and the shadows dance to a trip-hop beat. This is music conceived in the wee small hours, carrying that particular clarity – or perhaps, exquisite exhaustion – of a world stripped bare by moonlight. His past in television scoring bleeds through; these are soundscapes sculpted with a cinematographer’s eye, vast yet somehow teetering on the brink.
This ten-track odyssey is less gentle stroll, more fraught navigation. Brooding electronics, that distinct ’90s Bristol throb, and cellos sighing like ancient archivists chart the course. Webb, occasionally joined by collaborators like Esthero or Derek Downham adding their distinct textures, confronts the weight of memory—separation, trauma, repeating patterns—head-on.
A synth might flash by, unnervingly bright like a single headlight on a desolate road, then a guitar – perhaps Mark Gemini Thwaite’s distinctive ache, recalling The Cure or Love and Rockets – etches a line of beautiful sorrow. It reminds me, oddly, of the scent of old paper in a seldom-visited archive, holding stories both poignant and unsettling.
This isn’t about easy answers; it’s the sound of someone finally unpacking an impossibly heavy suitcase, item by painful item, under a single, unwavering bulb. The search for the ‘inner child’ here feels less like nostalgia and more like a gritty reclamation, a difficult truce with what’s been.
The light offered isn’t a sudden dawn, more the stubborn glimmer of a distant constellation. You’re left a little scraped, a little more awake, and oddly companioned in the dark. So, what resonates longer: the pain depicted, or the sheer will to articulate it?
