My Review: Esses - Bloodletting for the Lonely

 My Review 

Esses - Bloodletting for the Lonely

You don't know if the knife in your back is more painful, or the emptiness it leaves when you take it out.

(Anonymous)

There is a community of souls fatigued by a series of frustrations, offenses, unrecognized personal identities, of fights that hurt beats, that lives on despite all this rampant toxicity.

And in Oakland there are people who gravitate inside projects in which they believe, without worrying (rightly) about whether it is wrong to be part of different realities at the same time: an exchange that instead produces lifeblood and generates strength to be able to demonstrate the rights and beauty of these intersections.

And if we're talking about music, then a perfect example is the project called Esses, an enchanting dragonfly that flies around the warm and captivating American city to get food. And it does so by adorning the air with leaden, heavy, passionate pins.

This dragonfly has five souls living in its effervescent, hallucinated, expanding body of wonderful liquid substance.

Esses reach the second act of their pyrotechnic show, a laboratory of analysis and pauses, made of research and contemplation, with a chalice full of blood at the centre of their stage.

I am annoyed to see them being compared in terms that specify similarities with Siouxsie and the Banshees and Bauhaus: I do not waste time with superficiality, I prefer to capture the beauty that has its own identity and must be defended. You only have to listen carefully to realise that the way Miss Kel sings has nothing to do with the 'Goth Princess' and neither does the music.

It's been 41 years since Juju, Siouxsie and the Banshees' last great album, but I don't see any presence of those compositions that can be compared to Esses. The same goes for Bauhaus.

Let's be serious: let's move on.

A second act that shows new petals, a decadence that moves through the genesis of Deathrock to complete its need of enrichment bringing to itself kilos of Darkwave, confetti of Postpunk, like an expanse of food of which you can leave your mouth eager.

We still move mainly at night, but the spaces of this flight have changed, with more complex sound trajectories and where the rhythms know more about slowness, giving the benefit of grasping the tension they can express even when they don't push on the accelerator.

Because guitars that whine in slowness perhaps hurt even more.

It's a pregnancy this album: you spend time waiting for a baby coming while your belly swells with liquids, creates displacements, and your back recedes, because it's undeniable that there are weights that increase.

There is not only joy in conception.

So Esses give sincerity, revealing fatigue and pain, using the microscope to identify the dark areas, to question the light.

There is the impression that the band has become a family, a compact dragonfly cleaning the earth of dangerous insects.

And one is enraptured by the magnetic wave, the hypnotic gaze that the songs can provoke. You become inebriated. And it's a sensation that dilates security to the point of killing it.

A listening that takes us around Oakland, showing it not as a tourist destination but as a place where wounds present themselves and the details, so precise, can make us worry, creating an outpost of tension.

An album that offers trauma, bundles of broken minds running without food. 

The melodies don't create fantasies but prisons in cellars and uninhabited garages, where desolation is not a problem but a generous comfort, a safe, unquestionable refreshment.

The claustrophobic sense of which it is composed is pure joy: in the authentic expression of what they feel we come to know truth and reality. That it is an artistic act does not remove value, quite the contrary.

Their madness involves us as an act of faith, it creates an addiction that makes us withdraw to enjoy these fragments of brain that we find inside our chests.

Miss Kel's voice is coarse, trembling and crazy, like a fearless moonbeam. She has the gift of not exaggerating with a voice full of sparkles, but she knows how to use it with precision until it becomes a charming nightmare.

The two guitars, those of Skot Brown and Dawn Hillis, are firestorms at the North Pole: they leave no chance for us to resist their complex and perfect interweaving. And they sound like missiles filled with deadly, asphyxiating black gas.

Scout Leight lives the bass as a mental earthquake, crashing down on the breaths with his powerful notes, beating with class on the bloody strings.

For his part, Kevin Brown plays his drums with all the impetus and turmoil of a Deathrock army that to win the war has stolen weapons from the enemy, bringing in its arsenal Postpunk and Gothic Rock material.

The sound is a poisonous and captivating mixture, a seduction that shows itself with immediacy and abundance.

I think it's good to put on the cloak now, turn off the light of distractions and go touch the new stalagmites, to better understand the sensation of ice melting in your hands...

Song by song

The Source

They are guitars like sick wings flapping, supported by a sharp drumming and by the voice that flies to steal the breath: the entrance to the North Pole is slow with the flames of Miss Kel's vocals to light up the night.

Pierce the Feeling

The first machine-gun fire has the Deathrock mould, bass, guitar and drums are craters with legs sliding on the ice, hurting it. Everything becomes magmatic and solid hysteria. It's a gridiron that wounds and the bandages arrive, dripping.

Four Corners

The atmosphere takes us to the Goddess DIAMANDA GALAS: it is the call of the pregnant belly that presses on the obsessive and sick drumming, the bass sweeps away the wind and the voice hisses everything. The opening guitar takes us back to London's Batcave as if time were a possible deception.

Infinite Void

The blizzard grabs the nocturnal creatures, it laughs as a painful progression, everything vibrates in the guitar that rips the ice and everything runs inside the void that claims attention.

Before the Blight

The entire recent Oakland music scene applauds this track, which sums up those artists' propensity to leave no room for doubt: it's a metallic, muddy swirl that invades the emotional corridors. And what has been the history of a musical attitude that is now forty years old finds miraculous oxygen in these minutes in order to still be able to generate emotion.

Little Mouse

Iron, worrying objects, electric tension, everything finds in the refrain the neurotic ecstasy that establishes the point of contact between the hardest, almost heavy sound to generate ecstasy of boiling amazement.

Faceless Past

The truce, the rhythm that becomes more cautious, while the two guitars create dramatic dust, the Postpunk that appears and where the atmosphere takes its time to let in this weeping voice but which sees the breaches in the sky. Hypnotic.

Caged Beast

Muffled and trembling, almost as if 1981 granted the grace to awaken, the song is a hypothetical bridge between tragedy, dissatisfaction and distrust that have the intention to escape. Gloomy, emblematic of the band's artistic growth, it offers new ways to enchant.

Schism 

We are at the dissolution of North Pole: its funeral is the band's farewell, dressed in mourning and faces full of fragility, with the song that closes the album.

It is emblematic that the rhythm is slow, the atmosphere that raises the dust of the ice is almost muffled. Visions, suppositions, with Darkwave stealing the scene smiling atrociously, but the guitars manage to vibrate without corruptions, giving the song the last chance to hush up even the silence. And this dragonfly ends its meal in glory.

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld 

Salford

14th March 2022

https://music.apple.com/gb/album/bloodletting-for-the-lonely/1580692357

https://open.spotify.com/track/5WL1a33nA8Iz0KHt0DyHBq?si=6VTsVEPyS2Kv3nLhS2JHaA