My Review: The Slow Readers Club - Cavalcade

The Slow Readers Club - Cavalcade

There is nothing to do: in front of what is vital we cant’t escape, we are trapped, sometimes even gently. And it is an event that has a cyclical nature, it feeds on itself to flood the senses in a blissful multitude. We seldom have an appointment with all this, perhaps with music the percentage of this probability grows.

In 2015 the second album of the band born in Salford was released: The Slow Readers Club, who with Cavalcade opened the doors of notoriety and began to be understood and consequently adored. The self-titled debut record had already shown their worth, although the band was not satisfied with the production. Magically sad tracks that made people dance with eyes ablaze with tears. Then this work made hearts burst supported by attention-grabbing singles and putting them on the lips of many. The musical mix shifted slightly while still retaining clear signs that the electro-dark genre fit the needs of the four guys in search of perfect songs. This required more dynamics and a turn toward greater integration among the instruments. It happened, thus giving the green light to Aaron, who injected the trail of every cry into his voice to sow power into a uvula devoted to unchained immensity. And the whole band took a remarkable step forward, with maturity as a consequence of a desire to make music a reason for total existence: it happened shortly afterwards, when the four  guys left their jobs to live totally on this passion.

Cavalcade was and always will be their breakthrough album, with the legacy of songs steeped in charm and capable of engaging the listener in a path of emotional lights and thorns that scratch the skin of the heart, with the senses surrounding thoughts often short of breath as they are able to show the true suffocating face of our existence. Here is life appearing with its crosses, a faith increasingly weighed down by mysticism, relationships made of depression, precipices and dizziness that make our wrists shake. The past, the present, and the future, united by chains that, through Aaron Starkie's extraordinary verses, find a way for all their fragility to be felt and exposed, find adjustment with the music that finds itself clinging to their expectations. The twelve tracks highlight skills and convictions, are credible and inject us into the subcutaneous life reflections and dances, connected and sealed for the future, with the certainty that they will not suffer aging. We are always moved, we feel cuddled by their sad-smiling tenderness, we are pierced by a wisdom that hurts, ending up succumbing to odorous atmospheres, through redundant guitars, keyboards with catchy loops and a rhythm section which creates a shiver on the trembling air, to make our life much more than a soundtrack. The Mancunians, with their gloomy electro-Dark, do not deny themselves trips into the 80s, but feel the need to remain anchored in modern sounds and create a perspective in which everything should be projected into the future, without nostalgia to weigh it down. You can feel all the energy, the exuberance that becomes a merit, melancholy as a duty, to make songs pilots of dreams and findings that also reveal the need to create new boundaries, thoughts and musical styles. Everything is solemn, heavy, frustrating in a pleasing way, deductive and devastating at the same time, as if the fun part of The Human League, of Soft Cell, could embrace the dark dynamics of Joy Division, in an artistic marriage that leaves no doubt about the talent and skills that will surely grow. Songs like vessels, like fresh grains in the earth eager for continuous and powerful seedings. We always have the certainty that life and death in the songs will find an embrace that can shock, because they are immersed in that melancholy that no one can deny is the common denominator of all existence. Compositions that give the impression of finding a way, in the live dimension, to have no constraints of development in the sounds, to leave room for small upheavals, and this will happen punctually. Some of them outclass the others: it would seem to be a negative judgment, in reality it confirms a very high level, making it possible to become attached to those that are able to immediately capture us. Therein lies the value of the album: what seems like its most devastating inferiority is realized in those songs that, apparently, seem inferior, less incisive. Those will be the ones that will attract you completely. Preceded by four singles (Forever In Your Debt, I Saw A Ghost, Start Again, Don't Mind) and with a fifth after the release (Plant The Seed), the other seven compositions are also potentially capable of being hypothetical singles, showing themselves to be easy prey to listening, with a willingness to write songs that know how to get to the heart without hesitation. 

Jim Glennie, bassist in James, realized their potential and invited the band to support them, eventually giving the four boys the visibility they needed, which led them to inevitable success.

It is the album that changed destiny, showing that their charts had the strength to enter the reception with eyes turned toward the future, the signature of the realization that their beauty would create new followers. 

Something morbid and soft penetrates our souls, which is inevitable, since the songs are psychedelic organisms, as they transport us from the subconscious to the earthly dimension: there is always the impression of a journey to the mystery that is only partially revealed. The interplays of the melodies have conspicuous brushstrokes of grey, the rhythms awaken the body's impulses to throw it into the most sublime and engaging emphasis, with the lyrics soaring because of their desire to make us question, while the tears live on effective, prehensile runs and slowdowns, destined to stick in our mind, which becomes generous in hosting them, albeit they are capable of often killing faith in man. And it is this sincerity that makes them irresistible.

The guitars are hooks, tremors, vibrations with many echoes, big brothers of our dreams. The bass, fat thorn on our breaths, continually wraps itself around our thoughts, to slam them to the ground, with seduction and skill. The drumming is precise, without ambitions of megalomania, and not because of technical defect: it is simply perfect so as not to deprive us of necessary dances. Keyboards are mermaids with  sly and thin nails, yet capable of entering the lower planes of our mood, to make it weep with majestic scratches.

The voice? A book would need to be written in this regard: and it would not be enough. Aaron is the master of tone, of modes of expression that make the soul vibrate, immersing it in the darkness of every breath, making his every note sacred. Addiction becomes ecstasy and one cannot help but have wet eyes, at least be moved, because that sensory bell is the vibration of an emotion that wants to be experienced.

You know, yes, and very well, that it is time to get to know these twelve flashes closely, with the hope that nothing will stand in the way of your total falling in love.

Song by Song 

1 Start Again

Never forget to pay attention to the lyrics of each song.

The magnetic fluid of the opening track is entrusted to a pressing bass that doesn't let go. Followed by two guitars that weld it all together with a fluid propensity to dream and fluorescent synthesizers.

2 I Saw A Ghost

Bang! We enter the story of a person unable to get out of depression with a perfect track: it moves across a continuous vortex in the head with verses in which Aaron's poignant vocals devastate us. In addition, the guitar is a melancholic wave that makes the senses square, with the bass warming the skin at the same time. The chorus becomes the black forest of every mental prison. 

3 Forever In Your Debt

Accompanied by a video which has the power to make us melancholy, the song demonstrates the class of the Mancunian guys who need no changes to explode in our rapacious willingness to be seduced by such sinful sadness. Bass and kick drum open the dance and then Aaron takes our hearts until Kurtis becomes the wizard of rhythmic-melodic solicitation, which will find in the refrain all the dust surrounding the loneliness of the protagonist of the track. 

4 Plant The Seed

You fly, you fall, you float in the 80's but with the curiosity of the current years for a song that sees in the refrain placed right at the beginning the two brothers on vocals. With an elegant synth almost segregated by the guitars and voluptuous bass, one manages to become a dreamy body in flight, with four decades blessing the splendour of this creation.

5 Days Like This Will Break Your Heart

Vibrant emotion is felt with these vocals that slaughter all resistance, in the dark and intriguing demonstration that the four are hurricanes of noble sentiments, as they are meant to scratch our every wound, even more. Irresistible show of fallen fantasies and photographs that establish loneliness.

6 Don't Mind

And it's love that wins: a song dedicated to the singer's bride and which sees the atmospheres take on light in a dreamy, pop viaticum dominated by Aaron's voice and the combination of keyboards and guitar as they lead us to a moment of serenity. With a delightful falsetto that wraps us poetically.

7 Cavalcade

A guitar riding through elegant echoes frames lyrics that paralyze with intensity and see the song grow even more so as the entire rhythm section manifests its powerful seriousness. Tears walk over the heart eventually touching everything inside as it rolls into a bombastic dance. And this voice should be given an award for enchantment.

8 Fool For Your Philosophy.

A song that has been present in their live sets for years, it is another rhythmic avalanche, a rush of the senses toward escape from this existence. It begins with an electro-dark base to enchant from the start. Then Kurtis pushes the sound of his guitar to a power that however restrained pollutes our little strength. And then the refrain brings us dancing darkness, leading to a part where everything becomes a clap of hands and hearts go up into the clouds to seek consolation. 

9 Grace Of God

Do you want the eternal enchantment that can make us lose control? Here it is! The atmosphere is rarefied in the verse, a drumming that shifts from syncopation to a four on the floor launches the song into the moment of the chorus where everything becomes sublime with the whirlwind of thoughts, making us lose our senses as we tremble. Keyboards are a subtle wound followed by guitars as polite splinters.

10 Here In The Hollow

The darkest jewel on the album, that purest diamond that overwhelms for its polite propensity to be almost pop while instead the words are hot blades, unbearable but resoundingly endowed with truth. The circular guitar is a tornado, the bass is sensual, drums are determined. But if we are careful we find ourselves in the dustbin of the universe, out of strength....

11 Secrets

Striking, resounding example of Aaron's love of the piano. And it is intimacy that advances in the making of our existences, with escapes and secrets forced to coexist. In the refrain drums become a hypnotic march and keyboards the grey in which to hide our mediocrity.

12 Know The Day Will Come

If the scribe wanted to die from the heartbreak of an unbearable present he would choose this track as his soundtrack. Devastatingly, by SRC's musical standards, the song is a farewell to any sort of connection with breath: for the melody, the intersections of guitars, the synths imbued with the rottenest sadness, and Aaron's vocals-lyrics-interpretation trinomial are a bottle of black blood that will finally explode in the evocative refrain. 

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

20th November 2022

https://open.spotify.com/album/0cb2jkeQT4GSoD8cddlTOF?si=Pr7d7q6rSOqBTRlUr6X-Uw