Tracklist:

1. Watch the Water
2. The Way of the World
3. Coombe House
4. Wash What You Eat
5. Like When
6. Basic Everyday Life
7. Hold Onto I.D.

Recorded from late 1996 through early 1997, Hold Onto I.D., The Shadow Rings fourth album, marks the apogee of the trios experimental rock epochtheir last record clinging to their factitious bandness before they let all song and structure go awash in sonic malaise for their final run of releases on Swill Radio. The surrealist dreams of City Lights and Put the Music in Its Coffin give way to pseudo-expressionistic lyrics mired in the banality and bleakness of the everyday, set against the backdrop of the Coombe House (as pictured on the albums cover). While Hold Onto I.D.is the groups most overtly autobiographical release to date, Lambkins lyrics obfuscate his expressionist tendencies filtering them through the codes and languages of officialdom, linking the inner self with documents of the stateidentification cards, National Insurance numbers, and British passport numbers. Having moved out of their parents homes and into the top floor of the famed Coombe House, Graham Lambkin and Darren Harris set out to rework material drafted over the previous year, aided by Tim Goss, still safely in residence at the Valebrook Inn. While the familiar sounds of Harriss deadpan recitation and Lambkins electric guitar, amateurishly strummed, dominate the album, the emotive interludes of Gosss keyboards populate the record along with of home-cooked tape experiments and dime-store concrte. Originally released on CD and supported by a US tour with friends Scott Foust and Karla Boreckys Idea Fire Company, Hold Onto I.D.is perhaps the bands best-known and most accessible album. (The Shadow Rings sole representative on a streaming platform, it was once acknowledged by the Guardian as one of the 101 strangest records on Spotify.) Offered here for the first time on vinyl, Hold Onto I.D.is an essential album for both completists and the uninitiated alike. Throughout their legendary, decade-long run, the Shadow Ring were an enigmatic force on the international musical sub-under-ground. Before their disbandment in 2002, this shambolic rock outfit, formed by a group of rowdy teenagers in southeast England, left behind a mighty run of eight LPs, a handful of 7s, and a spate of raucous live shows and cryptic zine appearances on both sides of the Atlantic, all which have bolstered their enduring word-of-mouth mystique. Beginning in 2023 with the first-ever vinyl pressing of the self-released preShadow Ring tape The Cat & Bells Club(1992), Blank Forms Editions has been conducting a systematic retrospective of the storied group. Wax-Work Echoes and Hold Onto I.D. are the latest releases in a multiyear reissue effort that includes several LPs, a comprehensive CD box set, and a nearly five-hundred-pagebook.