Grand Lake’s debut full-length offering, Blood Sea Dream, is the culmination of a decade and a half of friendship and musical camaraderie. Anchored in the youthful, exuberant drumming of John Pomeroy (Nichols’ boyfriend), the album twists and turns sonically and topically – winding its way from the angst-filled art-rock of ‘Louise (I Live In A Fantasy)’ to the gently lumbering, orchestral waltz that is ‘Our Divorce’. The straight ahead rock of ‘My Father As A Forest Full Of Trees’ finds Nichols singing desperately about confronting his father – currently an inmate at Old Folsom Prison in California, who abandoned Nichols at the age of six – while just a track earlier he sullenly croons an epic poem of American wanderlust in ‘Riderless Horse’. Through two sides and twelve tracks, the musical and lyrical juxtapositions of Grand Lake’s Blood Sea Dream weave in and out of each other to tell a story familiar to all – the facing-down of demons on the long drive home.