My Review: Death In June - Nada!

 My Review:

Death in June - Nada!

Once upon a time, which seems so far away, there were small workshops where the craftsmanship aspect, besides connecting romantic and unique features, consisted of passion and specificity that were not part of the industrial methodology. 

In one of these, a small number of human beings with a rebellious and desecrating enthusiasm came up with existential theories and multiple sounds, linked in any case to post-punk sounds. Their short journey was enough to set on fire demanding minds hungry for oblique propensities containing pills of artfully disguised wickedness. A project that quickly took a different direction, having been entrusted to the brilliant creativity of only two souls: Douglas Pearce and Patrick Leagas, two torches of creativity with truly distant DNA, but capable with their actual second album of sowing seeds that on the one hand will germinate becoming the creature of the solitary Douglas and on the other will see Patrick conceive and form Sixth Comm.

Here there is a contagious freshness that branches off in willpower, possibility and the ability to create a pyramid that is outlandish but absolutely capable of arousing a passionate fury of still-shining gems in a today where loneliness, despair and destruction are more the sign of a suffocating actuality.

This work is a collection of moving nihilistic masses, a collection of follies held in place with tape and the intention to fix polyhedral waves of depression with a nostalgic matrix. 

The personalities of the two guys seems to create a divided work, where each one paints their own propensity with distant characteristics that can magically amalgamate through listening, like a sidereal and powerful unicum. Continuous lacerations that make emotions bounce, distributing them in the various Darkwave and Industrial meanders, with the avant-garde summing it all up through its own will to inflame minds in an impressive emotional fire.

A truly seminal album, capable of expanding streams of magnetic propensity for mixing icons, movements where paradoxes are anaesthetised, and in which everything converges towards an amalgam that compacts the end of the 70s to the first part of the 80s, in a collage where planning, inspiration and sonic dynamism were able to introduce a different way of making music. Thanks in part to David Tibet's supervision, this dark-coloured emerald manages to live through continuous transformations, a melting pot where techno pop dance assembled with minimal sparks of post-punk is placed, with the emergence of that neo-folk that from the following record will be increasingly present. The lyrics have absolute peaks but also some banality: the latter will definitively disappear from the next work. The industrial matrix timidly shows its impulses and this is all due to Patrick, the only one really eager to include it in this episode, which is nevertheless capable of an impressive stylistic range. 

The two, however, have been able to be calibrated operators of magic and tragedy, of apocalyptic rides, of knowing how to fascinate through this musical ordeal in the time of the dispersion of human values, contributing to suggest reflections and studies that, starting from history made of excesses, have found balance in claustrophobic details.

With their music, one is boxed in amongst emotional jubilations and thoughts capable of exhausting, with fatigue becoming a precious ally to keep tensions trained: with Nada! we are in the fan that becomes the detail of their coffers, in a gymnasium where we train our flexibility to be able to accept the abundance of intense and dazzling proposals.

Everything seems like aestheticism, a glorious and manifest intention to echo the power of human failure, with violence and operation making us feel we are in a cell in the garden of future torture. As if oxygen was not the most indispensable element of our existences, the two were able to throw us inside tons of watery vapours, clouding our positivity and propensity for serenity. Ten are the reflections of this wandering and elusive diamond, floating us through the ocean and the darkness invoked with solicitude and power.

These song are madness sewn on the skin, an oil lamp of infinite beauty, with a remarkable telluric force capable of disrupting systems of withered quality of living, in a whiplash of effervescent sensory impact: the two were intense and full of more than ever toxic fuels to make our tired anxieties pale.

Nada! is the naked and raw allergy to what is known and tired, a kick in the ankles that is able to make our aching complaints tepid.

If disintegration can be the land of an accomplished and effective rebirth, then this work becomes the viaticum of black-clad hopes to alarm our mouths with tarry and sour tastes, but after digesting these diamonds a sense of eternal purity will know how to make our wandering more serene. 

The visionary plan of the project is addictive, in a cascade of elements that seem to be linked to a discipline with a complex but profitable gestation, making the heart tremble, with states of agitation clinging to the basal ganglia like the parents of a degenerative disease that leads to a macabre and succulent smile. Deductions and conclusions can be drawn, but these compositions are capable of inducing us to insecurity, and with each listen everything seems to fall apart, as a feeling of psychological subservience tears our minds to lead us into a carnal and unsalvageable addiction: these are mortal sins to which we can only surrender with enlightened conviction.

Standing in this swamp of atomic sparks brings us back to the sensation of a war that drapes the senses in ancient, almost malefic and desecrating dreams, in the context of an inner cold that burns the thoughts: Nada! bypasses comprehension and like an interrupted deflagration reduces us to scattered shreds in the magical power of an oncological madness.

The ones that flow from Douglas’s pen are seas of visual and literal introspection: the baseness and decline of the world here still have a mask, which will be removed and replaced within a short time. Meanwhile, we learn how music, especially where Patrick is at the helm, has a lot of space and this leads the combo to find balances that, when Douglas is writing, are leaning towards more copious words full of suffocating, gloomy light. We are not at the level of duality or a forced separation at home, but rather in the territory where different intelligences, propensities and sensibilities are the perimeter in which to extract from the sludge the material that by the two guys, it should be specified, is well amalgamated. One finds oneself, however, inside mirrors that instead of reflecting each other's abilities cast shadows that one loves in any case, without difficulty. Sprinklings of psychedelia with a cloak full of scratches and bloody lumps give the project an almost biblical aura, with a slight reference to the most nebulous period of that musical current, the London bank.

In conclusion: an example of how certain uniquenesses are only apparently short-lived, possessing instead, between the folds of mystery, all the motivation and capacity to move into the future in order to experience the majesty of eternity.

Song by Song 

The Honour of Silence

Seeds of neo-folk create the outpost and the sky becomes a lamp shaken by drums, the western-style movie arrangements find residence in a trumpet that sublimates the apocalyptic sense of a story that wants to honour silence. The foundations of Douglas Pierce's future are made evident in this track, which sounds between the sepulchre and the vault of heaven.

The Calling (Mk II)

Patrick sings on the most electronically inclined track of the album, with evocation mode switched on: something sacred is mixed with sounds from Germany for a result of gloomy beauty, over industrial implants that contemplate an acoustic guitar, while the dance curves our backs. 

Leper Lord

Douglas becomes a medieval archer, capable of vibrant, baritone vocal melodies with a propensity to soar towards the celestial vault. The angels invoke him in this short track which opens up the night to hear creatures weep.

Rain of Despair

It is a convulsive, almost techno dance that makes us vibrate on the hypnotic banks of the song, an addictive, transporting chant, to push us to notice how Fields' loop has been reduced to the essential in the name of a magnetic industrial expression.

Foretold 

In a room, where an introduction almost smelling of a religious service paints the walls with gloom, echoes of Kraftwerk try the approach, but then the path taken is the one of escape and displacement towards a black-nailed cabaret, with Douglas's voice seeming to invoke intensely obscene-faced gods. A track with a slowed-down ebm inclination, phenomenal and evocative.

Behind the Rose (Fields of Rape)

Hallucinogenic mushrooms approach folk contaminating moods and movements: another track symbolising the emphasis of the new priest of the lost lands, where time is a void in which all consciousness is lost. The arrangements are an example of accurate explorations towards an ancient aesthetic, with the voices kept lightly bathed in echo and reverberation. 

She Said Destroy

Lightning, again, to enter the darkness with a thin but effective melody, where all reluctance collapses before this new diamond full of decadence and trained fury, to lead us to the temple where dried flowers and the beauty of the absence of light are contemplated. And on this track, too, thousands of new disciples will get their hands to extract its secrets.

Carousel

Here is the carpet of mystery that travels through generous doses of electronic grooves with a hypnotic grin and eighteenth-century dust pulled out of a sleeping cloud, backed by the guitar and evocative trumpets. Vocals seem to have come out of a Marc Almond in love and enchanted by the sequence of lies and sins.

C'est Un Rêve

Shrieks, scratches and sparks of tears, combined with the chaotic clamour of abundant anxieties are the prelude to this black heart evoked and found: the claustrophobic dance that follows is a bouquet of a severe and ordered madness to convey the feeling of a dutiful sensory imprisonment.

Crush My Love

We conclude our listening of this ten-sided diamond with the enchanting Crush My Love, a paranoid display of moonbeam confusion in search of the ultimate sleep. Between the hypnotised France of the 60s to the vapours of Can, with charming psychedelic sprinklings, the song makes clear the amplitude of the antenna of Planet Death in June, which transmits frequencies full of suggestions and frozen shivers.

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

1st September 2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwtE_PJB4rI&t=18s