My Review: SECRETARY - Parallels

 My Review 

Secretary - Parallels

Since the beginning of man's presence on this planet there has been a need for protection. No matter how we have built things and situations of comfort, there has always been an avalanche of elements that have made us feel, and still do, that without protection we are afraid, we feel uncomfortable and vulnerable. And since art has existed, with its various forms, perfect zones have been created to preserve ease and discomfort for eternity, hoping that the first was and is the winner.

Then there are those who, with an album of songs, present both situations at the same time, and you cannot help but find yourself stunned by this intensity. Perhaps it is because of the opposites in this coexistence, or because of the inability to resist the beauty of pain that tries to smile by telling its story.

The result, in any case, is a listening with the heart which is like an earthquake that, while on the one hand destroys, on the other shows what it does in secret, and it is still a joy that offers the strength to rebuild.

These tears are the tenderness that bumps into loneliness at the traffic light, smiles at it and carries it around for new dreams to be made, waiting for better times to come.

In front of this intention one must be very careful: Ellison Wolf and Em Maslich, with the project SECRETARY, are capable of shattering, gently, every refuge because their intensity actually shows us how theirs is indestructible.

Whether it's the music, the words, the voices, everything becomes a constant disintegration because nothing stuns more than intensity, the ability to colour the darkness by bringing it inside us. You have no possibility of escape.

You cannot handle the river, however beautiful it is, because in these forty-seven minutes it has enveloped you in its motion.

In these nine tracks every second is a fist which caresses and combs your soul, to destabilize and comfort at the same time. 

We have experienced all this before, in the most devastating songs of Radiohead (with whom there are points of contact musically speaking) and The Postal Service: of the latter we can feel the common will not to stop the planning of a pain that wants to live in order to kill it.

These songs are sparks that make us understand how intensity can be contemplated and desired and how they become melodic swords that enter from the tip to sink to the handle.

The nineties at their very best, with that attitude of exploding. With the sound of the 2000s.

The whole thing without distortions, but with that suffocating feeling which in its being unmanageable attracts and fascinates.

The guitars, the Rhodes, the indie drumming, the leaden bass, the voices like pearls in the dark, are all programmed to be vehicles that continually clash against that desire for protection I mentioned at the beginning: everything becomes the season that does not exist, the sum of the real ones, and there is no word that can define the essence if not the effect, which is a crash.

A sweet and bitter crash, consequential.

Love, in this album, is a contemplative and magnetic syllable, where the eternal is already present, as a surprise with a lump in the throat, and the lips, clinging to the jumble that moves, sit between the notes waiting for the beating of the angels' wings to die peacefully...

Song by song 

When you know, you know 

A prayer.

The beginning of the album in its very first seconds is exactly that.

A prayer that quickly combines with an electronic approach to freeze the soul, to convey a psychedelic sense of the need to rise.

The voice, on a hazy but diamond pattern, seizes our altruistic impulses and makes us selfish: how beautiful it is to depend on these vocals that make painting its most respectful dress and lead us to desire it. 

The guitar strings are walks that start at the altar and bring us on the streets with electronic music illuminating the threads of our inner tension.

Words

Is it possible to combine trip-hop, funk, electronic music of the 60s, the night with its mystery and the feeling that the purest psychedelia lives in the lightness of small, veiled but gently overbearing instincts?

Yes, Words is here to prove it, with its sly manner, its physical form consisting of short and rarefied guitars, of keyboards like water in a short continuous jet but already capable of wetting our faces with tears. And when the guitar appears, everything becomes an embrace and sweat, while the high notes with delay are nothing but the initial prayer that has not finished its journey...

Wave

How fast is the pruning, violent. How slow is the growth of branches, peaceful.

That's it: in this track we start from the cut branches and with the passing of the minutes we find ourselves in front of the majesty of an elegant tree scented with autumn frost.

Because everything grows: starting from the semi-acoustic guitar, to the voice, to the electric one and to the whole that embraces warmly in the refrain with the scent of life in the phase of farewell.

Then comes the change of pace, the guitars bumping into each other to become reflections of Felt and Television, with the bass insisting and leaving bruises of post-punk memory.

The rhythm of the music grows with this voice that sticks to your heart.

You can't stay cold in front of the black sun that invades your skin with those intense interactions of notes and voices (with counter-songs and falsettos which are your tears that are mirrored), that make you, at the end, when even the rhythm gives way, a rag to reflect on...

Retroacting 

Almost as if it were a modern Gregorian chant, the track throws itself on an ancient folk that cleverly mixes with modern music and Radiohead are there, as guardians of this enchantment, with a sad face.

Like carnality at rest, the song, in its slow drama, offers to remove our now soaked, throw-away skin.

The title of the track, when sung, is already the shot that shatters the silence of the night. The guitar and the Rhodes deceive us, everything comes down to make our belly a dump. The melody brings us back to the heartbreaking work of Saybia, the Norwegian band who is queen in this particular condition in making us dumb. The Secretaries are on the same level.

Then the challenge is to the note that can make us fall faster.

With its irresistible charm, this tune is the acid that will make us swoon at the moment. There will be more coming.

In the meantime, you can find tissues to caress your melancholy that is making love to sadness, where the real orgasm is our listening.

I know It's Wrong

Jeff Buckley, from the second album, arrives at the beginning of the track, with a drumming and a bass that are corsairs stealing our strength. But then vocals shock us even more, with their delicate movement, taking us to the marmots' shelter where the whistles become the keyboards that warn us that at night emotions are naked. The drumming, articulated and lively, stops at a certain point, giving the voice and the bass, and then keyboards, the task of offering the heart the seductive rhythm of fear: how much beauty is shown!

And echoes of Sophia of Mr. Robin Proper-Sheppard appear in vocals, poignant and sweet at the same time, adding pathos to those millimeters of warmth that can be needed at any time.

Too Far, Too Late

The heart as a warehouse from which to steal the secrets of its propensity to dream. In this spectacular molecular ensemble of enchantment and vitaminic impulses, the song we are listening to is perhaps the most successful in highlighting how progressions, changes, are the shutters of their talent which, when opened, show themselves without shadows. The guitars, two perfect ones, like sea acrobats, dive into the empty air, free of friction, to fly over the water of this incandescent mode. If this is not the song that best shows that their deck is made up of 336 cards, the number of seconds they need to stun us, then I don't know what other track can convince you that Secretary is the charm of modernity that casts its nets to entrap us. How wonderful it is to feel defeated before this procession of brushes dipped in the sacred oil of perfection.

Tramadol

The bass is an earthquake, the keyboards its squire, the voice the consciousness that loses itself in the reverberation, where everything scratches with sweetness, with the celestial falsetto, on electronic music which is minimalistic but of immense impact.

This is the structure of a duo that amplifies the direction started by Radiohead in the early 90s, to personalise the mystery towards a more conscious theatricality, in the sweet and surreal din that we are forced to live. 

And the last fifty-two seconds are the farewell we didn't even dream of. And yet...

And yet we are blessed by this cadenced sacredness that is able to annihilate.

When the musical genre becomes what it really is: something useless in front of the majesty of artists capable of dethroning the most erroneous concepts.

Fires 

What happens?

An almost Fado, an almost heart attack delivered by a guitar with a warm red dress, surprises us, Ellison's voice becomes a sad and blissful nettle in its walk, red like the guitar, on our skin which, giving way, turns white.

And then off, everything accelerates, pushing like an angry animal, with vocals kept a little far away to give space to the angelic orchestration of a boiling fabric. And everything comes to be a torture to be worn in order to run away from the world.

Wisdom

As the last dish, the ninth, they bring us a fruit salad: Mazzy Star, The Postal Service, Alt-J, Radiohead, The Doors, Can, in a ballet of references and suggestions, in the slow mixture of comets and debris, of beats and electronic music half-hidden by the fires of a piano stuck on a few notes, to establish our wisest sense of enjoyment: now we know we have heard a perfect Rite.

And it is praise to the horizon, to the bodies waiting to catch their breath, to the feeling that everything makes sense in the final act of this forest full of splendid shadows, where the mould dances slowly, happily.

And it is the Lord of Wisdom, the bass, which drives the melody and the strength of this Goddess, with the right notes, to the farewell, sure that everything will become inevitable and we will go right back to the hors d'oeuvre of When You Know because the misery of our ignorance deserves to commit the only right sin: to eat again this apple called Parallels…

Alex Dematteis 

Musicshockworld 

Salford

March 1 2022

https://secretaryband.bandcamp.com/album/parallels-2

https://open.spotify.com/album/6SLwm8OqURTkEe5VYn1XCB?si=i2N4Bpv5T8KFQ9Qu4prXng

https://music.apple.com/gb/album/parallels/1334522196