We have featured DoomFolk StarterKit, the recording project of Nashville-based David Swick, several times in the last couple of years. What began as a creative songwriting exercise, Swick challenging himself to write and record new songs within an hour-long time limit, is now a fully-fledged project, as this year’s EP 2Hands attests.
Just in time for Christmas, Swick has unveiled a cover of Advance Base‘s ‘Christmas in Nightmare City’, a song which fits the DoomFolk StarterKit style of quiet introspection perfectly. Taken from the album Animal Companionship, the song is set on a lonely late-night drive, the protagonist restless as they struggle three months into sobriety, all captured with Owen Ashworth’s distinctively quiet power. “No-one writes Christmas songs like Ashworth,” as we wrote in a review of the record. “His aesthetic and temperament are the perfect medium to capture the strange mix of sad and magical.”
None of this feeling is lost in Swick’s take, the stripped back style and hushed vocals capturing the same sense of seclusion, the balance between inner turmoil and the strange peace of quiet roads, the odd beauty of the twinkling lights of an oil refinery. The sparse arrangement accentuated with subtle touches of bass and pedal steel from Bennett Littlejohn, taking this version into folkier territory than Owen’s, and it really works.