My review: Black Swan Lane - Blind

 My Review:

Black Swan Lane - Blind

Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who have already been there.
(Neil Gaiman)

In the artistic journey of each star, the years slip away, with the impression of a huge fireball that does not lose light, but rather gains it since that is its uniqueness, a peculiarity that remains as a testimony to the whole alongside time.

Jack Richard Sobel holds in his hands the secret of continuous outbursts, the ability to insert his inner sensibility within songs like a foil shot that does no damage but is addictive: an enchanting wound.

He continues in perfect solitude his writing of comets as miracles, sticking them in the universe of our needs, making all his new creatures spiritual mirrors with, this time, a concept album that baptizes spirituality and religiosity, with figures full of depth and signs of this time addicted to the will to live.

To do all this Jack has taken real figures, rhetorical images, poems and stories with the desire to describe human immobility in the face of the passing of time, the excuses, the aggravations, the morbid vices reluctant to change, the struggle to keep trust in others despite an attitude that would not want to cease to be such.

Deciding that rock soul is the perfect soundtrack for his musical projects, the man from Atlanta has doggedly thrown himself into creations that incorporate the spirit of BSL but with the will to draw new pictures, new nuances, a sense of union between the old approach and a modern taste, with astonishing and certainly atypical ideas for him. 

These are not lamentations, they are puddles of life reflecting these last two years, with the ability to take a leap into history, to show apathy before the opportunity of a surge ahead that, with a heavy heart, once again did not happen. After having taken the weak human parts, the historicised ones, incapable of evolving, Jack placed them inside an ampoule, had them stagnated, disinfected and inserted inside a centrifuge in order to extract a juice that is intense and unfortunately beautiful: it is the destiny of geniuses to make splendid those things that struggle to be considered useful.

There are mental places that shout the need to escape, the need to find refuge within welcoming wings, of desires that do not lose their voice or intensity, to retain a minimum of dignity: he has found them and gave evidence of them within songs that create a dreamy film in our trembling, not as acts of joy but of awareness.

All the compositions have a high emotional charge, a lava river with wrinkles and wheezes that awakens the torpor of dumb brains: everything becomes the whip that brings us out of the dangerous coma that time has made solid.

Songs that oscillate, like summer clouds, between the ecstasy of colours and the fear of sounds that escape without yielding to time.

But everything is placed on a tarnished, unprecedented visual plane, a blindness that by opposition shows a reality determined to defeat the progress of a civilisation increasingly at the edge of madness. And so, as the only resource to cope with delirium, Jack draws treaties of melancholy, with substantial changes from the past with songs rich in arrangements, brilliant ideas like tricks of necessity, to arrive as never before at a singing full of pathos, with lyrics that travel within characters and mirages, stories where interpersonal relationships are brought to light with a blindfold on...

We see BSL's projectuality become a concept album, to bring us awareness, slabs of emptiness that in the Atlanta artist's baritone voice can come to screams, to shivers connected to rationality. The eyes burn, the soul does likewise without becoming an apocalyptic whole thanks to the innate gentleness of this angel who never denies himself first lights of positivity. In these wounds and bundles of breathlessness, the compositions know how to become the perfect column not only of our time but an accurate encyclopaedia of human lameness, incapable of advancing with dignity in the progress so much desired.

Jack addresses our soul, scrutinises it, recognises it and surrounds it with poetics, spurring it on, after a necessary testament to its conditions. There are, however, grounds for a haste that is absolutely necessary in order not to completely consume ancient possessions from that Eden that now seems to have fallen into an abyss. Faith is in man, like criticism, a conscious exercise that makes BLIND a necessary album to identify the state of illness, rather than health, of man.

The peculiarities that make the band from the state of Georgia absolutely unique remain, but where the sturdy side of rhythm and guitars is attenuated, we see them become melodic scalpels, caresses, along with a revisioni of what was produced decades ago, everything with a modern attitude, in which technology has helped Jack develop new sonic ramifications. All this led him to finally disengage himself from comparisons with the Mancunian band The Chameleons, finally showing the world the depth of his independence and ability. Those who have followed him for that reason alone will see how he, at least, has grown. It is fascinating how this latest work is able to range through musical genres in a more specific way, whether it be Post-Punk, Dreampop, Alternative always so able to stimulate him and clarify his infinite talent. The slow songs are not really ballads but emotional hideaways that open the window a little, to let in light which warms that blindfold. 

Intimate, shadowy, seductive, conspicuous in its showing us the evocative power of lyrics never before capable of encircling our reality, this tenth album marks a turning point: the change of conception towards the modality, foreseeing from the outset instruments and structures that Jack had never needed to bring towards these dimensions. There is a conviction of dominant drives, of a rush towards unseen spaces, a plane of curiosity that left a mark on the body of the songs in a considerable way.  All this under a black bandage, a symbol of modern blindness, capable of creating monstrosities only to conceal and disavow them. The impact of Covid-19 is evident but without flattery, just a powerful need to highlight the miseries that have entered even the increasingly twisted mechanisms of interpersonal relationships. Fragility is part of blindness, a happiness to which one is not allowed access, where destinies find themselves united in succumbing to darkness. What remains is escape, detachment, the will to free oneself from the slipknot of dynamics that the Atlanta singer has identified and shown within these tracks.

The pain must be washed away, but also replaced by a humanity that knows how to learn so as not to repeat the causes, and perhaps angels are the only ones who have the power to do this. The sense of breathlessness (one of the devastating effects of Covid) penetrates but leaves light, the will intact not to give in to this disaster. The album reveals how the melody of thought is the only effective weapon, and the evidently increased use of keyboards produces this sense of transport, of a flight that can still be made so as not to drown. In the absence of joy, the human entity changes its skin and attitude and in these songs we are able to know the effects and find our own mode. Compositions like dreams in front of an ocean of nightmares ready to envelop us: an almost impossible dialogue that the art of Black Swan Lane has instead made possible, making us witness this duel. 

Like a long dialogue where there is no shortage of demands, we are in the presence of songs like scales, sieves, globes of the geography of a rational world that has made boundaries different, to give voice to our thoughts and to make them in turn become a singing like an indispensable mirror.

What has remained of the band of the early years is the ability to make us feel inside unique rivers, with the intention of not forgetting the history of a decade with forty years on its shoulders. But there is no tendency to repeat itself, to find itself inside comparisons that undermine its actual capacity to have its own backbone, an independence that is now truly complete. This makes the album feel streamlined, broad, without artistic gags and weights, dense with a style of its own that Jack has perfected after starting this journey with Vita Eterna and the subsequent and penultimate Hide In View in full autonomy: no addiction or nostalgia for a career under the Black Swan Lane label that began in 2007.

There is room, therefore, for everything that was once unimaginable: compositions that are free to insert instruments and samples to specify the vastness of ideas without having to report back to anyone; an approach that is at times almost pop but never banally cheerful, where melody is never an indication of approximations to win approval. Rather the need not to be too heavy-handed, given the great spiritual matrix, to leave a ray of sunshine in our listening. 

The guitars, the sovereigns since the debut of A Long Way From Home, oversee but do not dominate, conceding space to the powerful and dynamic drumming, to the bass that reveals strategic performances, insights, with a more rock approach. What about the keyboards and piano? The real Princes, more present than in the past and structured with the task of releasing all the power of songs that in this way seem to reveal a different and very engaging style. 

Above it all, Jack's voice and vocals: the biggest surprise, either for an enormous ability to interpret the lyrics as never before, with fine effects, or for a devastating power without the need for screams or high registers. All linked to lyrics that show an uncanny talent for finding phrases that nail us, that create a circuit that tattoos itself in the mind. 

The miracle of this album is to attribute to blindness the power to make visible what should not be seen, combined with the intention to look at life with the consciousness of the eyes. The result is the best artistic expression Black Swan Lane has ever displayed, overcoming the obstacle of a concept album that could have killed the intention. Instead, everything flows limpidly with the joy of being pleasantly alone, in one's own intimacy, benefiting from northern lights within sonic sparks that are indispensable to better know oneself…

Song by Song

Wishful

How to unite the classical-flavored melody that has stood up to the modern one, to the aggression tamed by a voice capable of opening the heart, in the context of a veiled critique and in the vicinity of forgiveness. The first track conveys a spectacular scenario that, not forgetful of the earlier Hide in View, finds a zone between light and rain in order to let the powerful drumming and the sand-filled guitars express themselves.

As Soon As You Can

What at first glance seems like a classic BSL-style ballad actually reveals itself for what it is: an ocean balanced between the desire for love and a religiosity that cannot save our souls. Here the semi-acoustic guitar and vocals prepare the contact between humanity and heaven when the electric guitar that plays with sweet notes, the slow and sly bass, the drums and a piano that surprises by surrounding our listening with pleasantness with a few notes also enter. Then comes a synth to envelop us in an end that like a continuous ray warms us on a winter day.

Blind

Disruptive, thunderous, moving, a salt factory widening wounds with a rock with a modern look. The unseen earthy permanence that reveals that sight has been lost, perhaps forever. The face of BSL becomes clear, already with the third track, through a harmonic interplay with choruses, an electronic seat dancing in the mind, and the certainty that this sonic wound can blind those who search for the superfluous.

In The Garden With Eve 

The most incredible song of the Atlanta band's career is here: terse and rough lyrics, a machine-gun blast that among cruelty, reality and nightmare is supported by music never before released by Master Sobel. And vocals that offer new modes and perspectives. Electronic music marries with melody, a mixture that drags the story into a paradise full of flames ready to freeze. 

The Fool

With a beginning that blends three classical instruments (giving an enchanting shock), the track continues with Jack's usual wonderful ability to give the melody the role of a driving force to bring hard words inside softness in order to keep them from dying. Here once again we see a change in the vision of a relational context in which music can soothe aches and pains. And the ability to write compositions with a seductive new mode continues, happily, on the edge of madness....

Can't Keep Me Quiet

The track that most represents Jack's love for the 80s is revealed through vocals with effects, the melodic part dragged along by guitars with Post-Punk clothes and a solid drumming. And it is an invective towards a society that changes identities and human history, where now it is the voice that does not want to risk muteness. Swirling words, as swirling is the music, for a demonstration that becomes the perfect buffer between past and present.

Case My Mind

An invocation that will procure tears with a long trail, with a wintry atmosphere penetrating the darkness of a man before a precipice. Everything becomes giddy, with a ballad that surrounds thoughts, the feeling of a dutiful self-discipline needed against a world that wastes its qualities. Abundant guitars, keyboards that glue beauty in front of sadness.

Fragile

BSL's new outfit becomes even more evident in this composition: music and vocals visit new territories, while lyrics perfectly certify the current situation. A religiosity that peeps out receiving small but appropriate punches, in an atmosphere which has a marked liveliness yet dense with moral fractures, almost in the vicinity of a sadness with no possibility of consolation. Where we all think we know who the others are, Jack puts us on alert for a tune that educates our presumption.

Drown

Holy Christmas comes, musically speaking, with this song that is a stove able to warm every heartbeat. But lyrics reflect a particular moment of suffering, the result of what has been the recent past that has shocked the world, where shortness of breath has been the terror of many. In the tide of elements surfing in this delicate sound composition, the complexity of the instruments gives a simply fascinating emotion.

Angels 

We seem to have returned, in part, to certain atmospheres present in Under My Fallen Sky, their seventh album. There are actually parts of decadent poems that make the song soar above the sky to make it immortal. The piano and guitars are symptoms of an infectious complicity for a composition that brings dreamy angels before our needs.

The Calling

Frenzied new example of absolute beauty: the bewilderment, the mental blindness that like a cancer leads people to perdition, over a perfect and engaging musical structure. The synthesis track of their artistic evolution: full of everything that has been Black Swan Lane's career, as it develops within balmy, perfumed guitars of frenzies lit by the rhythm and vocals that float in our minds. Happiness and bewilderment face each other inside this snowfall of notes, of pauses, of something that almost seems a chorus but is not and dazzles us, then relaunches the race for the call our minds must be ready to answer. A tsunami that strips life of dirt. 

Escape

Between romance and the perfect blend of melancholy, bewilderment, and sadness, the penultimate track of this masterpiece leads us towards the light of which we do not know if we will be able to enjoy the entity, because in every escape there are parts of blindness. The guitars are wind drops supported by keyboards that gush tears without stopping, capable of taking us into the vault of heaven to fade before the eyes of those who witness our departure.

Jack has found a way to give music the role of messenger, with a story that breaks our legs while everything remains in the zone of beauty, because that is his "limitation": to be a carrier of this dutiful necessity...

Nothing Here To See

We are at the last one: the circle inevitably closes since at the end of this journey there is nothing left to see. And the emptiness before all this is represented by a sonic cuddle that sets the boundary of softness, with dreamy vocals, for the last message of the album that is pronounced and put on this chariot through the snow. The guitars, the scratchy electric ones and the sinuous semi-acoustic ones, know they have to go for keyboards for a result of absolute melody. We end our listening in complete blindness having, however, heard a resounding record that we will forever see in the garden of eternity...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

11th November 2022

The album will be on all platforms starting December 6, 2022

You are already able to order the cd right now

https://blackswanlane.com/store-2/BLIND-p402215601