My Review: Submotile - One Final Summit Before The Fall

 Submotile - One Final Summit Before The Fall

"Tension is who you think you should be. Peace is who you are."

Chinese proverb

The beauty of being able to arrive at inner peace through listening to music is something rare, a privileged propensity, an event that smooths the accumulations of toxins that every experience of this life normally offers.

In the world of continuous and exaggerated music production, the reality that emerges, in all its seriousness, is that of the unwillingness to take the time to study, to recognize, to evaluate and weigh what we listened to.

But in doing so we should always keep in mind that this is a type of knowledge that needs method and respect.

The risk is to accumulate songs and albums in the place where awareness gets stuck and does not allow the fluidity of received impulses in order to historicize them for their real value.

In this October of the year 2022 comes a rose garden that glows with freshness and where the colours of emotion and curiosity are intact and capable of swelling our eyes in a joy that amazes and knows no addiction.

The authors of this secular miracle are Submotile, a combo of two souls devoted to rhythmic poetry, angels who develop melodies that enter our veins releasing the oxygen which fortifies the breath of enchantment.

The third album is a soft pyramid that unsettles the heart by enveloping it in rhythmic arms, devoted to melodic impact that defeats all reaction: a work that smells of untouchability, making us beings kneeling in adoration.

Listening to these new songs is a journey into astonishment that materializes in the place of unwavering embrace, in the midst of polite broadsides and brushstrokes of sonic craters that unveil the light of our beats inclined to dream. A nine-chapter story that is neither fable nor novel, but a continuous breath of episodes like sheets of paper that absorb their natural gifts of being spellbinders and soft rulers of the realm of a modern Atlantis, where the impossible travels among the notes and not on the sea.

Like a modern Poseidon and Plato, they have the life-and-death power of their souls hiding their creature's latitude from us while showing the myth of the depth.

A remarkable step forward from the previous two works: a sense of compactness and research to develop structures that are not tied to a specific genre. To be able to communicate new languages that give the two  of them a way to have more arrows in their bow, taut and capable of making music cover long and precise distances.

What reigns is the certainty that the two artists have found a balance, the maturity necessary to defeat the feeling that it is only a state of grace that rewards our lucky listening: repeating them confirms this reasoning, revealing how much of the future is already evident in this album which is the first breath of their new vitality, giving Daniela Angione and Michael Farren the outfit that will protect them later on. This album shows their artistic condition in perfect health, confirming their propensity to truly experience music as a project of growth. Here the songs are bricks, concrete and all that is needed to make their house solid.

It seems more than three years have passed since their brilliant debut with Ghosts Fade On Skylines, which had connected the scribe to the Italian/Irish duo. A work in which a feathery impetuosity won, while in the second Sonic Day Codas the melody of vocals and a more dreamy inclination made us be listeners benefited by songs that also reiterated how shoegaze was changing skin. In this third album everything is confirmed, but adding more freedom to the creation. Through it all, the second consecutive production by Simon Scott, the Cambridge drummer of Slowdive, reveals that their union is capable of raising the bar of their wills, of making their compositions a confidence-filled gaze toward an increasingly astonished and amazed sky.

The watts at their disposal are many, embedded in Daniela's tiara and Michael's diadem: these symbols of power are rightly above the heads of the artistic couple, which brings forth in us humble listeners the joy of knowing that we are ruled by songs that turn us into sovereigns of pleasure and unfettered fortune. Music and words, the beautiful cover that makes us fly over the peaks of the world: everything, in this third step of their splendid career, finds a way to be beauty without an expiration date.

Daniela's lyrics have taken care to possess the ability to transcend the belief that love, loneliness, memory, trust, redemption, awareness of the power of the mind and the experience of life are not important in these genres of music: all these topics are visited by the gentle soul of this Italian who combines her descriptive maturity with the beauty of her singing, always convincing, free of hesitation.

For his part, Michael leaves nothing to chance: his fingertips, his pedals are a pact for eternity where everything exists powerfully, the sense of rhythm resting on notes nailed by their own beauty to live and die with our listening. The sound is sullen, resolute, dynamic, steeped in moments where everything reaches the heights represented by the cover of this record. And the stratospheric Blood Loss confirms his ability not to be oblivious to semi-acoustic flavored windings before diving, lightly, into a slightly more powerful sound, but we will see all this better in the Song by Song analysis.

It overwhelms the sense of absolute ability to take their musical journey to the inner mountain of their sensibility, conspicuous and infectious, to make us wandering particles, as an obligatory stop toward a friendly destiny: music can rarely do this, it is necessary to give them credit. The style, the sense of belonging towards their roots avoid comparisons, there is no need to give them a positive evaluation because there are references in which to feel comfortable: what suffocates any musical genre is precisely this condition and their talent lies also in this aspect, because they are able to travel inside Noise, Shoegaze, Dreampop and an often disguised Alternative, with great elegance, as well as with remarkable skills, to find their own uniqueness.

These are songs that give the certainty that loneliness and social sharing can coexist, without disorientation or impossibility: personal intimacy and the desire to dance with other people live together in a love story with skin that changes like these stars, smooth and soft but also rough, inside a ring where the tiara and diadem fit perfectly, giving us magic and daydreams.

One Final Summit Before The Fall is the transiting universe of two souls who, in perfect health and union of purpose, show their curiosity and ability to observe dynamics that can still be explored and analyzed, in a continuous beam of light that allows us to see their trajectories limpidly, even when their wall of sound would theoretically seem to obscure the clarity that is instead inherent in their compositions: just listen to everything with depth and all is revealed in a golden scroll full of value…

Song by Song

From First Light Until Our Final Sleep

With the first seconds, characterized by guitars in the orbit of The Cure, the impression that the band's sound and attitude has changed is confirmed when continuing the song it takes us to the clear evolution of the rhythmic aspect, with 90's drumming, joyful but wrinkle-filled guitars, until the stop-and-go at minute three and fifty-eight seconds: everything becomes magmatic rock for a shimmer of splinters revealing a majestic presence. Thunder and noise united in the poetry of a revitalized shoegaze.

Resonica

The rhythm rises, guitars grate dust, psychedelia swaggering in for a track that drags with its ability to immediately explode, only to allow Daniela's voice to caress our hearts. Guitars like windmills until the refrain where everything becomes definitive, impetuous and cathartic. Can rhythm be given to the ethereal feeling? Certainly: Resonica is a dream with the muscles of a thoroughbred horse.

Hit This Summer

Scents of late '80s Dreampop conquer the first few seconds and then everything continues in the gentle frenzy of pulsing guitars perfectly embraced by drumming that paints impeccable trajectories to drive our legs crazy. A long pleasant sonic contortion leads us to realize that it is not a journey what we are taking with this song and album, but living in our home where we already have everything, without having to pack our bags. Hit This Summer is the duo's breeze watering our absinthe-filled veins.

Foreshadowing

The first single from this album is a petal in flight over memories, with many reminders that are anesthetized by a perfect production, precise and careful and capable of enhancing the music/vocals pair, enabling the Italian-Irish duo to write a jewel that, with incendiary guitars, removes the blanket from dreams to return the beauty of living, extinguishing the shadows.

Blood Loss

If there is a primordial cell of this album, it is Blood Loss, the Divine, the one that indicates the continuation of the band's artistic journey: the past is held under arm, the present, established by changes of rhythm and guitars that know how to play in the alternation of their dress intertwined with melodies, is a reality that transforms the desire to diversify it into a resounding fact. It is syncopated poetry that meets relief, through the academic kiss of a miraculous performance.

Hope In Sound

A celestial arpeggio immediately delivers a complex structure in which the bass engages the drumming and pushes it to wrap around the guitar. For her part, Daniela sings sinuously and everything becomes a controlled frenzy in a chorus with a pop matrix, which conquers and stimulates us to notice how the band has the ability to reach into different expressive terrains. Even without distortion one is swept away and attracted by this little siren that waters our skin with hypnotic summertime ecstasy, where fragrances are completely released.

Drop To Eternity

The most surprising song comes with its very first seconds: as if we were entering the room of their intimacy, the band unleashes a lively, tender jewel devoted to eternity because with them beauty does not age. One can stay young without being Dorian Grey, and with this new gem the devil surrenders: what we see is a clean ocean free to advance in the heart. Everything is choral, compact, incisive, in a clear demonstration that with them we can also listen to an acoustic part that, if drawn by their fingers, can comfortably enter us.

Ataraxia

Lightning, thunder, a story that becomes a cascade with twists and turns, changes of rhythm, rich but disciplined guitars, vocals in the backline but evocative, capable of dumbfounding us for miles and miles of pure sonic joy. Though devoid of copious doses of feedback and distortion, the penultimate track turns out to be powerful and magnetic.

Farewell Aquarius (And We Thank You).

The longest song of their entire career is a melancholy-tinged novel, a dutiful sieve of existence in the proximity of an epilogue shrouded in mystery. A lonely cloud drifts through the fog giving us a chance to notice  a remarkable work of the bass, which rides harmoniously on the trails of nostalgic guitars, close to Catherine Wheel, while the sidereal atmospheres allow Daniela to make her vocal chords magical, like cotton candy, and to be surrounded, in the central part of the track, by avalanches of sounds drunk with light. Then it's a long leave that makes us astonished and true to their clearly shoegaze approach, with fine strands of noise creating a perfect conclusion to a work that, without a doubt, is the Shoegaze album of 2022 for the scribe.

It is we who thank the band for this visit inside their majestic beats...

Date Release

21st October 2022

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

14th October 2022

https://submotile.com/album/one-final-summit-before-the-fall