My Review: Cloudwalk - Rose again; My sun, My Mind

 My Review:

Cloudwalk - Rose again; My sun, My Mind 

Swimming in the waves of enveloping magic leaves us incredulous, stunned, like foals on trembling legs, frothing at the mouth because of the amount of hemispheres that seem to make us perform a universal gallop.

It happens sometimes looking out at the world, listening to music that becomes just a planet to inhabit and that manages to inhabit you, when attention and sensitivity join hands.

I’m going to talk about an album that is taking me on a tour of emotions, of intense considerations, giving the breadth I need, as a remarkable energetic experience.

The band is Danish, a breath of pure sweetness coming from the north to bring us the warmth that only a lack of depth can believe it absolutely cannot originate from that part of the world. The music they compose and perform with great class is capable of astounding if one goes beyond clichés that can kill perception: there is only one place where they are able to live and that is amazement. This album is a remarkable debut: in fifty minutes and eleven tracks we have food for the soul that can feed us, shake off the fog of boredom and mediocrity to settle our faltering intelligence for as long as we want. I was mentioning magic and that is precisely what resides in the electrical circuits of this magnetic, purifying and majestic vapor, which as the minutes go by leaves us stunned and trembling.

I could also try to technically define the genre, but that would seem reductive: when one looks inside a cell, all specificity is absent and the eyes pulsate with manifest descriptive inability before what seems indefinable.

Yes, certainly, shoegaze is present, like a revisited and corrected Post-Rock, but the core of it all is much more likely connected to an invisible form which controls the force of human nature.

With this shell the content can only be intense, prone to a beauty made of increasing intensity, protected by the moon and cosmic silence. One enters the sonic coatings as echoes of a time in need of listening, where the air is rarefied and everything becomes an immense gift. The synchronous work of synergies that create atolls, surrounded by musical waves that bewitch, segregate the trivial and purify us, appears evident.

Like a confidential jolt of chills trained in evolution, everything appears clear to be shared by senses aligned in a firm and invincible pact.

Outdated dynamics show their uniqueness more than evident to stun and compact our polluted modes of approach in feeling, like glass blowing toward light brightening the worldview. Vocals are always wrapped in heady, loose, vigorous sound movements capable of taking off the reins to lead us into a free gallop.

There is a poetry made of harmonies like cotton balls plunging into the softness of silk, an electric system of continuous jerks, adult and aware. 

There is a spirit of dedication and wholeness that breathes among the compositions as if one could do nothing more than write the story of an ancient beauty with modern means, depicting the light and dark of existence with delicate propensities of respect, without being pretentious in sounds but in suggestions that fly by taking us with them. 

The irrepressible sparks are visible when the poet passes them on with his verses: so do Cloudwalk, combining day and night in the circle of continuous beauty where, if one wants to be captured, captivity becomes a privilege.

This band knows how to shorten distances and erase the differences between the beautiful and the ugly by eliminating the latter, without having to explode anything, but subduing it with a class that absolutely cannot lose the confrontation, because ugliness is extinguished before this movement that like a tightening circle cancels the power of those who are not accustomed to considering beauty as the only possible throne.

It’s time to examine this territory that leaves us open-mouthed, to breathe in the immensity of the universe in flight towards what makes mystery the only reason worth getting lost for.

Eleven heavenly candles, the first being MY SUN, the entrance into beauty with cadenced guitars reminiscent of the importance of Durutti Column and certain 4ad bands.

CAGE OF LOVE is an almost robust song with vocals that seem to come from a wolf with a low voice, for an atmosphere at the end that remains dreamy.

We come to STRANGER and are moved: the density of the heart finds refuge in this melody fit for a hug between tears. 

MOONSHINE: one stands waiting in the introduction, ready for an attack. But then it is a wonderful and ecstatic dreamlike area. A dream that unfolds note by note.

A gem entitled RAYS OF WISHES will enlighten even the deafest heart. If Slowdive went up north they would sound like this.

The amazement continues: a piano shrouded in night light is the structure of RISE AGAIN, which needs very little to whisper us a maritime melody, among beautiful waves.

The K2 of the album: GHOST TOWN, shoegaze that expresses itself in little-known maturity, indulging in a measured expansion of sound. 

And now Everest: with I WANTED MORE, the flight over the world with the sonic wings of a resounding song, fresh snow in the eyes crying happily. We get lost in its rich structure capable of gluing us between its feathers.

BULLETPROOF: Even arrows can make a circle... Something sacred comes out of this atypical march, a procession where their intensity is celebrated.

What is evident in this album is the propensity to make the sounds and instruments compact, but also to give space to the effervescent brilliance of a sinuous guitar like that of FADING WINTER: it shows, you just have to know how to wait and you enjoy this walk through vibrations almost close to thriller, as for example in the end.

The path among the candles comes to an end and MY MIND is the consoling gem that makes everything we have heard even more valid and interesting. It is wandering in time and among the waves of the guitar that opens them to deliver us a masterful singing.  

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

25th May 2022

Brett Tootle - vocals, guitar Jacob Mignon - guitar, backing vocals, piano Teis Harrington - drums Amalie Dallerup - backing vocals, piano, keys Sebastian Krogh - bass

https://open.spotify.com/album/1jfHtSbupVDBCpQHUKjiQU?si=C-rYcaODTEW-_5h5KyQUtQ