Bashful Billy Late For An Early Grave Review
Bashful Billy
Late For An Early Grave
A Corpse With No Name
2025
So, pull up a tombstone, get really uncomfortable… or hell, pop a lude, sip something stiff and settle in. Because what we’re about to talk about is far from business as usual. It’s a séance wrapped in vinyl. A séance called Bashful Billy.
This spectral entity is the latest creation summoned from the crypt by one of underground Horror's most tireless necromancers, Argyle Goolsby. You know the name. One-half of the legendary Blitzkid, the shadow that dances behind The Roving Midnight and the whisper in The Hollow Bodies… Goolsby is the kind of artist who doesn’t rest in peace, because he never rests at all. And yet, somehow, each project breathes its own haunted breath, each one distinct and unrepentantly alive.
But this time, Goolsby isn’t alone in the mausoleum. Enter Nicholas Edwards, a name I admit I didn’t know before this, but one I won’t forget now. His presence is felt like fingerprints on fogged glass, smudged, emotional, undeniable. Their collaboration bores a sound that’s nostalgic without being derivative and aching without being melodramatic.
On Bashful Billy’s debut LP, “Late for An Early Grave”, we aren't merely listening, we're time-traveling through cobwebbed corridors of post-punk romanticism. This album is a love letter written in bat’s blood to the pioneers of British melancholia: Joy Division, The Smiths and The Church… Whispered echoes of velvet voices and jangling despair. But what separates “Late for An Early Grave” from being just another shadow play is its organic heart, there’s no cold programming, no overproduced gloss. It’s all real instruments, all real hands, all raw, pulsing devotion. It’s tactile. It breathes.
Lyrically, it’s a confession booth. Songs steeped in unrequited love, bruised isolation, and dreams turned to ash. But the draw isn’t in the darkness, it’s in the tenderness of how that darkness is handled. These aren’t songs written for effect. They’re stitched from scar tissue, carefully and lovingly. I've followed Goolsby since Blitzkid’s first howl into the void, but what he does here is something else entirely. Delicate. Introspective. Vulnerable in a way I never saw coming.
And Edwards, he doesn’t riff, he bleeds through the strings. Every guitar line sounds wrung from the heart, not strummed from the hand. It's not flashy. It's felt. Deeply. It’s not technical. It’s emotional alchemy.
“Late for An Early Grave” is a perfectly balanced séance, every track aligned like headstones in a moonlit cemetery. Nothing feels out of place. Nothing begs for attention. It’s the type of record you must experience, like a dream you don’t want to wake from. Me, I heard one track and ordered the record immediately. No regrets. That’s just how I haunt.
Standouts? “Butcherbird” claws at my memory with talons made of my personal history. I’ve lived those lyrics. The music becomes a fogged mirror reflecting versions of myself that no longer walk this earth. In that song, I see the people I’ve lost. The person I once was. It doesn’t hurt, it aches. It heals.
“Exquisite Noose” slinks through the alleys of my subconscious like a lost lover’s scent. Its melodies are sticky and spectral, both charming and chilling. “Six Nails”, it’s not a song, it’s a ritual, a violent absolution wrapped in a velvet glove. A sonic key to a door in your past you’d sworn never to open, but now you’re grateful you did.
This record isn’t entertainment. It’s absolution. A slow dance with your past. A midnight letter to who you were before the world started carving into you.
And yes, it's still available. 500 vinyl pressings only, 250 in Stormcloud Blue, 250 in Translucent Sunstorm Yellow. I grabbed the yellow. It felt right. It looks like how “Butcherbird” sounds. There's also a digital version for the modern undead. But trust me, the vinyl is the spell circle. That’s the format this record was born for.
If you’ve ever loved Goolsby’s work, this will hit you like an old wound reopening, and you’ll thank it for doing so. If you haven’t? This is a hauntingly perfect place to start.
“Sing your verse, no one’s heard…”