It isn’t often that you find William Blake’s words and wisdom woven through a contemporary song, but that is exactly what and who we find at the heart of There Is Always A Dawn, the new one from the splendidly named Judas Goat & the Bellwether.
If Blake saw the dark Satanic mills as a blight on the spiritual promise of a new Jerusalem, Sara Vian and Pete Vincent view their modern equivalents in more ecological and societal terms. But essentially, the call is the same: a call for freedom, be it freedom from pollution, oppression, or, in Blake’s case, a more spiritual freedom.
The music that powers the message along is the perfect vehicle for such ideas. The lilting, delicately picked verses mirror the song’s eco-spiritual aspect, and the anthemic choruses are ideal as a rallying point for the masses.
There Is Always a Dawn looks to the future, a cleaner, more liberating, more enlightened tomorrow, but it also looks to the past and reminds us that the fight against the destruction of the natural world has a long history. It reminds us, too, that it is also the fight against the enslavement of not only our bodies but also our minds.