My Review: Antic Clay - Hilarious Death Blues

 My Review:

Antic Clay - Hilarious Death Blues

Poetry can dwell among the notes, having black wings in a dark sky, above the desert of every dream.

The writer is Michael Bradley with the project Antic Clay.

Having taken his notes, he went up to Asheville, North Carolina, sowed enchantments and inhabited that America kept hidden in his songs, doing much better than his previous band, Myssouri, who were however creators of bitter-tasting tunes that the scribe likes so much.

Hilarious Death Blues is an afternoon of oceanic intensity, head bowed, mind bathed in mature and intense writing, amidst musical genres that kiss his generosity, his intention not to undress his clothes swollen of stories with a dark saliva.

With his harmonica and his bloody-bellied guitar, Michael has boldly moved in the footsteps of David Eugene Edwards, but with his own sensibility, in a double album to sow nettles and torn clothes, like a Nick Cave lost in the strategies of complex songs, with faces in need of water. Because these compositions wet and refresh the mind, give consciousness towards thoughts that need street lamps lit all day long.

Biblical dialogues between angels with sinister smiles, the gloomy mountain of pain survival falling apart in its ink, inside a magnetic and magmatic dark-folk, where there’s no way of avoiding its fascination, where admiration arises from a warm voice describing time and places like a blessing lying on our hunger for miraculously simple but decisive songs.

Listening to these twenty-one tracks, there is a risk of asphyxiation, of visiting his mocking talent that does not give a damn about our need for comfort: his hands draw anachronistic situations and thoughts capable of shaking our stomach, as if it were one long composition, a theatrical play in two parts where soft breathing is not guaranteed.

And it is precisely here that the album's enormous importance lies: the ability to carry us to mystical, impervious zones, full of salt and screaming wounds, through his sweet voice supporting every pain.

The musical structure becomes cathartic and changeable enough to let us understand the depth of the strings of guitars full of shadows, among arpeggios and country rhythms that penetrate the dry clods. And we have a blizzard of notes which suffocate life: having overcome the challenge, everything falls into tears that comfort because the humanity he sings about needs emotions.

An absolute masterpiece, therefore misunderstood, by those masses of people who seek immediacy and lightness without commitment.

However, I would like to invite you to glimpse, which sometimes constitutes the anticipation of seeing, how much wandering and wonderful intensity travels within this work, so connected to other masters of poetry, of stories that are blinded, crushed, violent but soft-sounding. Because this is the disc: enchanting in its aesthetic sweetness, diabolical in its lyrics.

I mention a cover version contained in this album: Decades by Joy Division, perfectly contextualised in the shell of his songs, illuminating sadness like a coughing through the high mountain paths. Simply monumental.

As are all the other tracks for a record you absolutely must have, lest you deprive yourself of the miracles that can make our existence better.

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

26th October 2022

https://open.spotify.com/album/46HYY7fTxWYo0Yby8ms3ru?si=l_ajAK8dTG6Fai08DyyMfw

https://anticclay.bandcamp.com/album/hilarious-death-blues-album-1-the-riderless-horse

https://anticclay.bandcamp.com/album/hilarious-death-blues-album-2-the-horseless-rider