Super review by Cal Gibson, of The Secret Soul Society.

‘It’s no time to cry about the past / Guess our love was never meant to last…’

Everything changes, nothing stays the same, love leaves, love dies, people leave, people die, yet somehow life stumbles on. The sun shines or the rain falls. Shit happens. More shit happens. There’s no sense to anything, of course. Is this it? This is it. The sun shines or the rain falls. As Synod wisely point out: all this consciousness raising is wasted on us.

So Synod turn out to be a ragtag group of musical urchins from North America who plied their trade in the early 70s right through to about twelve years ago. They made a number of recordings between 1972 and 1984 and Tramp have whisked this musical miscellany into another unmissable bout of rediscovered juju and middle-aged voodoo. As ever with these archival finds they’re a welcome antidote to over-produced maximal 2025 business. It’s rough, raw, whispy and flimsy: dreams that have been dreamt, filed away, forgotten about. Lives that have been lived, sort of.  Roads not so much less travelled as not even glimpsed.

Its chock full of delightful vignettes of youthful abandon such as the title cut with its doleful longing undercut by the sense that there’s something missing from the troubadour’s life. Pitched down pop feels give off a wayward funk: Crosby Stills and Nash sidelined by cheap narcotics and delusional ideas – as they sing – ‘I know I’m running away to nowhere….goodbye baby goodbye.’ The guitar picks out a few lines of regret and that’s it: the party’s not over, it’s barely even begun.

I Want To Go Home is perky, full of females that delight and males that do not. Eternal quests undertaken by spotty youths with drum kits and cheap guitars. Ramshackle certainly but full of vim and vigour: private press vibes in excelsis. The Monkees on acid, perhaps. Or perhaps not. There’s lots to like here, brevity and bravado and time-keeping that’s, well, idiosyncratic. Who knows where these tapes have lain undiscovered for all these years and frankly, who cares, they’re out there now and we’re all the better for them.

Sheryl Song Is Gonna Do My Dancing channels Sly Stone: synths squawk and the beats flim-flam their way onto the shakiest of dancefloors. It’s vibrant, edgy, slapstick almost: disco given a twist, a turn, a rinse and a burn. There’s space for another guitar solo, a bass breakdown: cosmic touches for an uncaring cosmos. It’s an unvarnished, tarnished beauty.

Never Without You is Alan Hawkshaw territory: library pop squeals for lovelorn lotharios ‘figuring how hard it is to live all alone….’ Romance rotted by circumstance, love waylaid by life. There’s plenty of la-las and yet more guitar licks over some cool Rhodes patterns. Joy being wrung from despair, you might say.

Synod then: appearing from nowhere, returning to forever, bringers of love, life and laughter and all the other youthful frolics us older humans have forgotten about. Nostalgia, hey: remember that? Lo-fi and lo-lovely, this is a charming reminder that we’re not here for long so just let it slide, Clyde. Synod got it going on, Ron. Forwards ever, backwards never: right? Right!

Synod After All Is Said And Done can be pre-ordered from Tramp Records.