My Review: DETOXI - First Flesh

Detoxi - First Flesh

The blurry soul drips wearily over the withering period. There is an urgent need for a shock that is not electric but sepulchral, that sinks what does not want to sink. There is a need for space, for fields to be ploughed, to be sown, for curved backs, and to hell with that which takes away fatigue, death's first twin sister, life's spiteful blood relative.

So we find ourselves with the indelicate search for wounds that narrate, contemplate the sonorous past of a decadence that was more authentic, therefore more incontestable. And of a voice that recalls the failure of the future, made blind by the waste of a world that produces but cannot understand.

Here is the voice, which feels the need to join exhausting rebel comrades, united by desecrating musical incest, of alienating depressive structures, sick from the concept to the tail coming out in a magmatic way from the amplifiers.

The story of this Californian band is recent, simple, full of grace in a swirling fall on our disjointed certainties, a magnetic quartet capable of making their sonic jet solid, an infirm unit on legs full of scratches, gunpowder on our mind accustomed to punishment.

Putrid loops: the bass like a vice around the neck, the malignant guitar full of dangerous crosses, keyboards more present than in the past and mother of pain, and the drums like a shimmering and gloomy chant that stuns to leave us orphans.

Their dark dimension does not stall, does not tremble, but, like a night tank in the silent noise of breathlessness, cleanses our weary heart in a sonic liquid that soils everything. The album's atmosphere is rainy and evocative, like an extreme chatter of wolfish souls. They wear the darkness to break free from society that invents fake lights and they press on the rhythm so that it joins the sacred mountain called Time.

It is the harvest of grapes with black clusters, sour nectar, like a sheet metal on the face, which deforms and makes us feel the pulse of the bones. Music that bewitches, that expands in decadent abundance to make us deaf, dumb, interrupted and bent.

Like great-grandchildren of Christian Death, they suspend joy to feed it with deadly pills: life as a shutter on dreams needs no further illusions.

The ears welcome, the thoughts separate, the body summarises in devilish jerks this avalanche in order to find the centre of gravity of meditative suggestions, chasing away that which is prolix and boring: Detoxi are not touched by this risk because they are four continuous thrills in search of fatuous fires. Rock only puts on make-up on the surface: the skin quickly makes way for the nightmare pilots who fire their bullets into the distraught weed of thoughts. So it's part Deathrock, part riotous Post-punk, above all it's a light bulb illuminating the attitudinal sepulchre of souls at home in the forest, where music flirts with silence.

Mouthfuls of gloom water the corridors of fear, despair lays its hands on us and the tale of contempt is slightly blunted, only ethically, but rage roars and crumbles our every aptitude for calm. Litanies like punitive manipulations find the centre of a stability that is only ever desired, but never put in a position to celebrate its possibility. It is not music, it is a splendid delirium revealing everyday inhumanity, a surgical need to open up madness and kill it. Without witnesses.

One should always indulge in the courtship of such aggressions, get killed a little, second by second, while these songs can squander our stupid listening: here it is serious, nothing resembles an art form, it is a sick body that snarls, scratches, mocks the propensity to taste.

Hypothesis annihilated.

One must die, and do it well, listening to the celebration of waste, the fake victories. They are writing the truth and it is likely that they prefer the falsehood of unconscious deafness to allow survival. But slowly Detoxi will make us genuflect.

Melodies are the sneer of these four devils: hidden, revealed, they flay the mass of similar music that by comparison cannot be considered as such because the class, the purity, the absolutely rough approach cannot belong to so many bands. For they are the kings of uniqueness. 

With moments in which horror punk visits their steps and the theatre of decomposition leaves their DNA in the grooves, one also finds oneself dancing, weeping, exhausted, stunned by solutions that remove doubt and make us realise that a work like this causes magnificent side effects. There will be no shrink who can put us on a couch. They will do it, to kill us in the darkness of our fear.

An album that is highly inadvisable for those who make music a medicine, a consolation, bread for the soul, a pastime, a cure: here there is room for the awareness that filth has won and they highlight the state of this generational defeat, where time has only served to do further damage. If you are looking for the exaltation of musical notes go elsewhere: here there are no masks and gothic tricks, because this is instead the place of awareness that will eventually defeat all selfish practices. 

We find ourselves being listeners to words that seem to come from the occult world of Gustav Meyrink, taking it all to a suffocation that seems incorruptible, as if it were a novel set to music without necessarily being a concept album, since our existences are unbound by a single story. And what we read/listen to crumbles, calls for the help of a culture that has no intention of supporting us. Detoxi does this very well by standing between need and acceptance with songs like walls, imposing, capable, deconstructing everything and confining us in their grey lines, where they perform and await our surrender.

The time to drink absinthe and cover the future with a sticky fan and we step inside these malignant swords, ten, which is the number of champions, because they are the four from Ventura, California.

Song by Song

Grey Lines

The world of Detoxi in one song: all the impetus of Post-punk, with the complicity of Derek's Deathrock guitar and John's drumming flying through the swamps, seems to open up a new boundary, while lyrics take us in front of a mirror with shadows separating the false from the true.

Modus Operandi

Oscar's bass prepares the liturgical assault of dustless ancient guitars that still know how to wound very well, and then Derek, with his moon vocals, takes us inside lyrics that visit the chaos of the future and make the sacrifice of those one loves indispensable. A lightning bolt from the Californian sky, it lands having made us sweat to tire our illusions.

Death of a Nation

It is time to start again, to create a future, with tears always alert. The whole sphere of mistrust enters amongst these scratchy notes, with an initial reference to Belfegore, with the attitude of coming out of the murk, aware of the details of messages to be decoded and the music helps, a lot. Leaders have destroyed language and led to death, and Derek tells us it is time for us to start again. Without excuses.

Cult Culture

Matt, prince of fingers on keys full of horrors, to make keyboards a dirty paradise, introduces Detoxi into the theatre of irrelevant faces, of rudeness, with the fall of culture, of which they celebrate the funeral function. And it is Deathrock in a new dress, a path that, opened by Christian Death, here finds legitimate heirs and a necessary evolution. One breathes the failure of progress that forgets the soul for its selfish tentacles. Beauty intoxicated by futility is celebrated in this track that restores the importance of truth.

Shape Shifters

Derek's eyes fill with distrust, for this track that shatters right and wrong and forces them to look at each other. Infectious song for its essential stop and go, while guitars and keyboards make love on the carpet of sadness pregnant with metamorphosis with the intention of reminding us of the horror of a theatre that does not want to die…

Black Square

When you can't sleep, you need the Queen of gloomy veils, in a reassuring gothic ballad. And here it is, naked and vulgar in its sincerity, nailing us with her 80s echoes to remind us that it's about time our conscience knew a little fear of failure. And it is music that becomes a ghost ready to lull us to sleep with the price our folly must pay. 

Crooked Smile

Bauhaus get their fingers dirty, to finally become capable of credibility. To do so they must call themselves Detoxi and have the purity of a mind enslaved and subjugated by the lies of a world in free fall. Powerful, evocative, the track sees the four druids gone mad, sickened by a dangerous adventure for a song that sweeps away the superfluous.

Masks

Undoubtedly the most spectacular track: daughter of The Lords of The New Church, it gravitates towards the abandonment of everything for a dutiful human change. It leads to a beneficial, magnetic outburst, to make us dance as identity abandons itself. Spectacular display of gothic melody.

Lesser Retreat

A warrior song, eager to show the world burning, with its apocalyptic attitude: the guitar becomes a gentle lament, the bass a priest of the pressure needed to crush existence, the drumming a crater into which we finally fall. Mysterious, tearful, it endorses all the talent of a rough and cruel band: one can only rejoice, weeping.

Nonsense 

Roses are trampled by a rush of sharp notes, willing to indulge abominable and necessary lyrics, to make the album's closing track a warning, a need to scold those who did not appreciate the show of murderous puppets. Powerful, violent, capable of bringing attention to the centre stage of life, it is a testament to the black beauty we applaud exhausted.

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

3 July 2022

https://detoxi.bandcamp.com/album/first-flesh

https://open.spotify.com/album/1Z3Hcspbi0enellEYrs5dj?si=p6Rf5IDMS02aFE0U28xtUA