My Review: Adrian Borland - The Scales Of Love And Hate

 My Review:

Adrian Borland - The Scales Of Love And Hate

Memory descends into the heart to make order, out of real necessity, to give meaning able to live for days to come. True friendship between men is possible, it remains even when someone leaves this planet. In this circumstance the heart becomes heavy, but to remember is to keep that life on a perpetual journey right here, in this tireless flood of tears.

A record can never summarize depth, but it bears partial witness to its journey and its rainbows, impregnable.

And so you end up putting your thoughts inside the secret reserves of two beings who confronted, loved and supported each other, with the talent in favor of both, with that of one of them already in the sky with his voice full of feathers and scratches, while the other remembers him, carrying on his name to fix it as much as possible in the hearts of many.

Adrian Borland and Carlo van Putten are the embrace that souls full of gratitude and true love need. And there is an album on the way that whispers the invitation to use curiosity, affection, the right measure of anger and nostalgia, the will to never pull the plug from looking at the sky in search of Adrian's hair and his class, which already has its place on the aces stage.

This is not a collection with three previously unreleased songs: rather, I would say, his existence laid bare, with simplicity, through the mode that gives him back, eternally, entrance into our ravenous welcome, to accompany us because it is he who loves us, who is at our disposal.

What does a champion need to remain eternal? His nakedness, without embellishments, superstructures, arrangements, because genius lies in the vision of a cell, which almost secretly takes possession of a whole body. 

These are fingers that glide over the strings with mastery, elegance, necessity, dragging along a voice that every time hypnotises, moves and arouses endless riots. Adrian is the latest superstar to testify how justice is not a human thing, how taste and musical choices are stupid, banal and violent.

Meanwhile he is an ocean of beauty that never sleeps, like the waves, always in motion, present, available.

Twenty-two songs that are stuns and slaps for those who, loving him, feel a poignant helplessness in the face of the inner earthquake that brought him down. He did not deny us but himself, in the fury of complexities that we cannot know, even less judge.

So one listens to him, as if frozen by his unique warmth, because in his songs (here in the pulsating state of birth, when nothing is needed but to appear) there is his flight, his trembling, the thermometer and goniometer of his intensity, which is his beauty, human and artistic. 

We collapse as our ears absorb and capture sounds and lyrics that become one, indivisible and perfect.

They emerge, strung together in a splendid set list, twenty-two silk petals that envelop and take up space in the only place they have to do so...

Those nineteen compositions we already knew seem to be born for the first time, within their impulses, frenzies, with the courtesy of one who does not want to disturb, bringing instead an incalculable richness as a gift.

The three unreleased ones are advancing seeds of amazement, continuous acts of a class that has neither gags nor bandages: Adrian is a fatuous fire in front of the sunset, and all three confirm the measure of an unceasing talent.

Carlo and the people who still affirm Adrian's value delight us with this purple band that is not a new interpretation or an improvement of already edited material.

One must listen carefully because here we are in the presence of the birth of flights that will be able to take us with him into his universe. Respect and awareness are needed.

There is no complaint, disappointment or pretension before this set of tracks. Rather, there is a thoughtfulness in the pursuit that, if done well, will be fruitful: he is a certainty.

The acoustic side of the London composer is that of perfection, which is not given by the absence of technical errors or inaccuracies, but rather by the noise that generates the feeling of all the purity which needs no other instruments: it is all generously offered in this luminescent ampoule, where strength and weakness coexist together in the magic that generates astonishment.

Refined, extroverted, introverted, bewitching, sad and truthful, they are continuous dives into his world with closed windows, while Adrian provides us with the range of his gaze. 

As you listen, you realise how the silence has been kind to him: it has allowed him to penetrate it carefully, without encroachment. These songs are the borderline between artistic exercise and encounter, where everything relies on wonder.

You find yourself forgetting what happened, you don't weep for his absence, you don't torment yourself, you don't scream but keep silent while the fingers of his hands on the guitar and his voice lead you to his sensitivity, you take notes, you don't sing his words, you switch off every atom of his presence and leave him free to chat intimately with your need to contact his soul, lucid and powerful.

He shows us that dreams can be touched, especially those that shatter against an adverse reality. All we have to do is understand that we have to walk with his thoughts in the opposite direction of our desires and it is at that moment that we feel his breath choking, the mind going crazy and the sky falling. One cries a lot listening to this album, because sadness stings the skin.

Perhaps we should imagine that he was happy just singing and playing: it might be an unavoidable assumption. However, one does not love him for this whim, but rather for the certainty that he did not let anything of himself slip away in the songs, he spent himself in loyalty. They are twenty-two gifts that do not clutter, do not disturb the space but generate a perpetually erupting volcano, where what drools is the melancholy that rises to be the faithful companion. Pains, frustrations and sadness arise and we must take them into account: it can be a tsunami, having to decide whether to let it overwhelm us or to build in time the mode that can extinguish its power.

Impossible.

Let us take a close look at his songs, with trembling and respect, in a generous propensity for attention, aware in advance that we will not be able to fully comprehend all of his art, but we will be comforted by knowing that in any case it will be pure stun…

P.S. Let us not make the mistake of thinking that there is a better part of Adrian that belongs to the period of the wonderful combo called The Sound. What Adrian did afterwards has the same value and capacity to write majestic songs. Let's leave the comparisons to fools, to ignorant, because to be unable to understand that this man was incapable of writing bad stuff means killing him a second time...

Song by Song 

1 Scales Of Love And Hate

"Seems like we've shut and locked every door

The deeper the cut, the colder the war"

We begin with dreams collapsing, confirming the distance between them and reality, in the impossibility that becomes palpable. It is a song that warms immediately, with the rhythmic guitar and the voice falling on the microphone, very tender.

2 Love Is Such A Foreign Land

"You're not easy to forget

But you're no reason to get upset"

Even angels pack their bags and will undoubtedly have this voice as they decide on their destination. The guitar, kept almost hidden, proves to be perfect for the whispery singing, which flies between low and high registers to the point of touching falsetto. 

3 Weekender Berliners

“Maybe I see you again, maybe I never will But I'll always have this picture that I hold very still”

An arpeggio flies up, in Adrian's voice, and everything is subtle, inside a story that slips, without regret, as you get chills.

4 Falling Off Your Horse

"I've tried to ride your dark wild eyes

Took a breath of air twelve feet up there

And then I tasted sand"

Among lost balances and what one has to pay for as a result, the song shows a swirling rhythm, strictly acoustic, and Adrian's short vocals, all poured into the void with great intensity. They are chords able to shake us, they are words that make our eyes swell as the voice takes us riding through the meadows of life.

5 Downtown

“I could be the ocean

Crashing into your land”

The voice inhales, the words come out vibrantly, and you get in the car with him to ride into town with a song that manifests his intensity, buttoned up to an effective melody, to remind us that his uvula can have wonderful claws.

6 Tired Man

"These eyes are closing now

I've got nothing to say"

The atmosphere slows down, echoes of a distant past show their face in these lyrics which are short but able to make us jolt, in vocals that show how much Adrian and Jim Kerr had in common. But here we are moved, we feel angelically dejected, and weariness spills from his lips as the guitar quickens its pace.

7 Unkissable

“Oh your sideways glance is like a lance 

And your whisper seems to shout"

The first of the three unreleased tracks is co-written with Carlo and is a blues and country soul travelling inside the hole of a head that spews lava and greyness. Enchanting, bitter enough to get into our needs.

8 Street Of Flowers

“And with smiles set back into stone again”

The second unreleased track seems to come from the fog on the outskirts of a geyser, dark and touching, with a trail of light that seems to be there by mistake. Adrian has a voice that moves every street with the flowers bowing, silently. A wonderful nocturnal whisper.

9 The Sea Never Dies

"Still the heart is an ocean and the sea never dies

Love comes and goes like the sun and moon".

Last unreleased song: here we have the ballad par excellence, that touches mobile shadows to tell us a story made of words and love, with fingers on the guitars that slide and emit a noise which is poetry. Everything is delicate but not timorous, for a track that explodes in the heart and not in the sound...

10 Our Forest Ghost

“Our forest ghost is looking out for us

Two hundred years he watched that clearing "

This voice enchants you, coming out of a miracle that always finds us unprepared. All the dynamics of his vocals can be found here, where past and present take possession in this track of their need not to be separated even for a moment. And one dreams while listening to the soundtrack of a movie, that of his talent.

11 Time Standing Still

"The moment you turn to go

Everything seemed to slow”

Love heals, but it also hurts, and you realise it through Adrian's voice as he seems to leave the planet early in this over-the-top folk performance.

12 Walking In The Opposite Direction

"And every day the things you crave

Make a play for my affection"

For the scribe the storm has arrived, the moment that absolutely ravages his heart. It will be the sad and immense chords, it will be Adrian's vocals that absolutely find the entrance to the weeping heaven, it will be the suffocating lyrics, it will be the anarchy that makes you free but definitely not happy, that make this song a repeated punch, with no escape from it...

13 Excavation Bones

"So you peeled away the skin

Past the ribs straight to the sin"

Here is the rendezvous with the densest and most revealing darkness of loneliness as a consequence, within low notes of the guitar that seems to knock at our subconscious until the rhythm comes along with this vocal interpretation that throws us to the ground, with the lyrics full of thunderous images that we cannot support…

14 Running Low On Highs

"I took my pleasures one by one Hovered closer to the sun"

We fall into a rhythm that seduces with sensuality, while the words suggest thoughts that strain happiness and security. The music has more space but then, when the notes arrive, Adrian makes us fall with him...

15 Valentine

"Unwelcome lodgers in my head"

Love is not immune to what is unpleasant and here we get proof of that: with a guitar near The Doors, the story gets sharp right away and everything drags towards the bitter knowledge, with the guitar descending to our belly... Written with Carlo

16 The Last Days Of The Rain Machine

'We sucked this world down to its brittle bones'

Adrian Borland is an extraordinary writer of lyrics: he knows how to use listening by turning it into seeds, often bitter and unquestionable. Sadly, his maturity comes with pain, and there is much of that in this track. The guitar draws splinters of rain and his voice falls heavy, in the tale of something that ends...

17 Snakebitten

"You say I should have learned by now

Yet I've only learned to forget"

The rhythm becomes a branch that moves us, nice and tight, with the angelic voice gathering a storm, amongst bites and things to forget. Very 80's, a mantra able to conquer, shattering.

18 Inbetween Dreams

“A great slab of day gets in the way

Of where you want to be

Breathing out, breathing in".

Seductive, captivating in the musical part, an acoustic dance that lies within the words referring to time, the absolute master of everything. And the voice becomes a poison and a thorn until it surrenders to dreams.

19 Hallucinating You

"Heat-haze at your edge

Where you protect me"

Confusion arrives with a series of rapid-fire questions, while everything has the bleak mood of a coming loss. 

20 Wild Rain

"I don't belong here, I belong to the storm"

Adrian takes us to his artistic summit, with a game of roles, made of questions and answers, as the gorgeous guitar fixes perfection.

21 Four Lonely Hours Away

“Waiting for the early trains

Kicking cans in the square

Funny how it always rains

On people going nowhere"

I apologise, but I cannot write anything about this one: only tears....

22 Dead Guitars

"Now I see all these new faces

And they look to me like a row of trees

And of all the friends that have now departed"

When everything dies, even a guitar, the list of disappearances comes to an end, it finds the stillness that opens the door to eternal life, with no guarantee that there will be something better. The last track consecrates his poetic vein with the violent bitterness on the edges of lips ready to die with their guitar...

You can order the album here: soundshaarlem@gmail.com

Special thanks to Jean-Paul van Mierlo for his contribution in promoting Adrian's music and soul and for his wonderful Artwork.

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

22nd November 2022