The music that Leeds duo David Fendick and Jonny Hooker make under the name of Fossil Collective is like one great flashlight in the dark. It's the only thing - as you're listening to it - that you could ever imagine helping guide you out of the darkness that's enveloped you. Sure, the beam is still surrounded on all sides by the darkness that you're afraid of, and you'll have to continue touching some of it before you're out of it safely, but the songs that they make feel like little saviors that won't let anything get you.
You're out there, broke down on the side of the road - no phone, no direction, no lifeline - and these songs are the headlights that come toward you slowly, some weird and impossible fortune that you might not have deserved, that you certainly couldn't have expected. It's help in the most dire of circumstances. These are people who have come to exist through magic. Fossil Collective songs defy the ways that we're constantly wracked and the ways that we're continually trying to get a handle on our blood pressure. These are the soft landings and the cool exchanges that dry our clammy hands.
Fendick and Hooker sing, "There's a sadness in your eyes and a silence in your soul," on this session, but it's not a singular recognition. It's one that they tend to find in all. They carry these traits too. They aren't recessive. They are dominant genes and they're mostly seen as those fragile and gorgeous pieces of a soul that are shown hesitantly. It could be why they approach us so tentatively with these songs, not wanting to frighten us, preferring that we'd let them in. They'll show us how to get in and out of that cold and windy night that we've put ourselves in. They'll let us dry off and they'll offer us a cocoa or a coffee. We'll never be good as new, but we'll be back to the way we were in no time, less in need and dogged.