My Review: Basement Revolver - Embody

 My Review:

Basement Revolver - Embody

If there are feelings that define our existence, we just need to take a trip to Hamilton, Ontario (Canada), and to listen to this album while sampling the poetry of its lake, which manages to be impassable in winter but consolidates the power of the gaze within its dark power. And deciding the fate of our listening is a sad fairy who is able to disperse part of this reality into sweetness, managing to eradicate feelings of loneliness and impossibility by writing songs like bitter steps over dreams, in a delightful, almost swaggering crossroads.

She is assisted by three companions with delicate but strong arms, like warehouse workers careful not to break anything, before moving their creations inside our hearts.

Open, sometimes sombre sounds, always in the vicinity of a minimalist shoegaze that uses calm to anaesthetise marginalisation in the precise lyrics of Chrisy Hurn-Morrison (the most cloudy voice at the moment), a woman who has in the isle the same searching matter she has in her hands, in a dance of astonished eyes.

In thirty-eight minutes, one will never find a moment to separate oneself from these emotional waves, from these rhythms and melodies that celebrate a truly feather-rich talent that sails through the rain and wind of our hearts…

Chrisy puts her thoughts in a boat and enters the lake, deciding to write lyrics with a deep look: in the absence of waves, she decides to sink sorrowful themes on a seabed that awaits them with trembling pain. The topics described are often circumstantial to real events and the propensity to mix them with an imagination that matures reflections that never dock at depression. And the music is given the role of a coma with brainwaves that move carefully, without the need for eagerness, to maintain a general atmosphere, embraced by dreamlike, sensual and cautious dynamics: a wise modality to learn from. With dilation and everything spread out with harmonious skill, the songs are a rational, sonorous concept album, a visceral exploration that occasionally looks up at a small change to show that they too have muscles in their arms. But they never throw punches: each thing about them is respectful, even when dancing, because they seem able to deliberately give atmospheres the power of a legendary frost that turns our listening into new thrills to experience, joyfully.

The trajectories present make these songs a gallery where the frescoes we can find are only partly reminiscent of their early work, three EPs and five singles, plus the previous LP Heavy Eyes. Their growth is clearly noticeable, as well as the range of variability at their disposal and the melodic designs in extension, with evident nuances that make this album a maritime star of our thoughts.

Capable of fixing well in our memory the American indie twist of the 90s, they have been able to go overseas and come and look here, in the land of Albion, where they have found shoegaze rainbows with a handbrake, where poetry and imagination make love with great kindness.

The aisles of their beauty are constantly filled with a rather difficult and dangerous crossroads that is specific in combining perfectly very often Dreampop and Shoegaze, succeeding like gods illuminated by an unstoppable and flowing talent, with melodies between darkness and sunshine, in an impeccable academic kiss.

Demonstrating how the pandemic could and should be used not as a boring pastime but as a valuable analysis, in these grooves we find the amalgam of reasoning and the enchantment of an evident spiritual evolution, where they manage to materialise complex reality with the need for simplicity, using a mysterious magic wand. This is understood when, listening to these eleven vibrant butterflies, one flies through sensory and emotional ups and downs, losing fear, gaining awareness that changes our identity. It is the guitars that drive ardours, it is the drums that discipline good taste with intelligence, it is the bass that makes our stomachs a sublime experimental theatre.

The four continually make room for intuition, converging as one combo towards the need to pour kilometres of paint into a primitive sadness, here dissolved in the calm sea of their sceptres. Capable of fertilising notes with sublime mastery, you can see their whole course of manipulation and their intention to give thoughts a window to snow-capped mountains. And it is precisely from the latter that occasional avalanches of sound descend, capable of exciting and making one feel the thrill of necessary fear.

Mirrors scattered in all their lyrics, in every note, make this work an act of discipline, the necessary development of knowledge, with a conspicuous paraphernalia, always generous, to be able to invade our chilled senses with awareness. Succeeding with self-analysis, finally, to make music a promiscuous and effective bubble, where everything happens by a divine design that they make us see, as a necessary concession to them, and that leaves us with the responsibility of not wasting the richness of this work…

Song by Song

1 - Skin

"Feel you standing there

Try to grin and bear, 

Touch me with your stare"

And it is a Catherine Wheel-style delirium that opens the album, with slow-core that puts on shoegaze clothes, for an enchanting walk inside the skin, through distortions and the bass that knocks at the heart until Chrisy's hypnotic voice inseminates us with petals of poetry.

2 - Be Okay

“In the darkness

It gets hazy

Stuck in its grasp"

The formula remains the dreamy one but everything becomes more full of muscles, with the desire to run in the darkness to feel the fresh air, to slow down, to run again, in the frenzy of guitars like wind scratches.

3 - Circles

"Try to take each day that comes

One step at a time

Decluttering my mind"

We are inside an analytical session with a painful implication, with the mind scouring for semblances, reflections, searching for answers in the emotional and rational marasmus.

The music is a psychedelic, slow, evocative room, kissing World Music until it elegantly moves into a Dreampop dance with a Shoegaze look.

4 - Slow

"If I could call you on the telephone

I'd ask you maybe can I just come home

Don't want to have to prove my innocence"

Necessary and nourishing enchanting tears descend from the trinomial voice - words - music to establish, on our senses, an absolute addiction: where the intensity, the anger, the desire to clarify lives, there will always be a counterpart of senses aligned towards the sky. An astonishing display of class, the track's atmosphere is a stove that succeeds in conveying the emptiness and fullness of certain distances, with music that, gathered in a night-time wooden bundle, suggests closing the doors to inaccuracy. Everything is perfect here and those initial tears will end up making you fly away from yourself...

5 - Blackhole 

"Every day it feels like more

Weight on my chest

Pushing me down

Consumes my soul"

Between a thirst-quenching rain and guitars that sow dreams, the track is a testimony to a delicate propensity to make love an open place, until it suffocates in a black hole. Like the November fog, here you can feel the dampness of a feeling that seems to be dying, but it is precisely these musical atmospheres that make it all become a perfect melancholic lullaby.

6 - Storm

"Maybe I was made to love you

Shake this tired head 

Fill my dry bed"

It remains the rain that accompanies this voice full of a radioactive pulse, a dripping in the heart, with a melodic line entrusted to a few but very sensual notes and a sound that seems a whistle kissing a polite reverb, with the drumming that makes the whole thing an echo of powerful suggestion, while in the refrain everything becomes delirious between the high register and the fluttering guitars.

7 - Transatlantic

"Liquid are your thoughts

I hear them flow

Like water trickling"

What an exceptional sweetness! We are conjugated with rhythmic diamonds, among fusions of spasmodic desires that overtake distances and guitars that are waiting to rotate and that do so gracefully. The rhythm is an exercise in perfect chemistry between the bass and a drumming that brushes poetic displays of joy. In the context of very profound lyrics, Chrisy dresses her voice in liquid crystals in which to see her potential fully shown.

8 - Dissolve

“Passing time draws us nearer 

I dissolve into you"

Sudden love comes and opens the pores: we are in the springtime of the heart and the music does the same, to unite a simple and effective story, to give time words and music like a heavenly song.

9 - Tired

"Carry the weight of your judgement

'Til I'm forced down on my knees"

Lyrics are a laceration, the voice is a hug, this music is a consolation: calories necessary to swell the mind towards a positivity that seems far away. A descent into scratching hands and musical notes like a cloak protecting this cataclysm...

10 - Tunnel Vision

"Deep, deep dive

I feel so confused

All the time"

Hallucinated and celestial Shoegaze, the remarkable sound of the drums, the guitar raising the dust and the words, minimal, soldering the din to testify that the band knows how to get to the heart of the matter, between the heart and the mind, as artisans of amazement. 

11 - Long Way 

"Your body will change

It will look different

Its curves and its burdens

Carry the shame”

Intellectual honesty requires sincerity and sometimes harshness, if not a not so veiled cruelty, to establish the authentic contact of existence.

The last track, frighteningly glacial and sidereal, is a continuous explosion, with and without distortion. It is an abandonment of masks and in order to be visible nothing must be complicated. Few chords but an unequivocal atmosphere determine the end of the album to give the listener an imploding joy…

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

1st January 2023

https://basementrevolver.bandcamp.com/album/embody

https://open.spotify.com/album/7egXCioiZMNz9EmGk7Z3GB?si=NBTOGPtKSJqGY2rlhmGK2g