My Review: Haunting Octaves - Secret Garden

 Haunting Octaves - Secret Garden

Can one find oneself after years of being in the wrong place?

Literature has spent millions answering this question, with advice, techniques, stories and poems.

It happens to the old scribe with Secret Garden, the second album by Californians Haunting Octaves, one of those bands that unknowingly  defines the guilt of ignoring, intentionally or otherwise.

What to say about this album?

Extraordinary.

Sublime.

Mandatory consumption.

In the name of a sublime compositional delicacy, to roaring applause, all ten compositions are eighteenth-century frescoes transported, unscathed, to the present day. There are no voices because it is the instruments, all played by the mysterious A.R., that sing. 

In his secret garden to emerge are melodic and melancholic Post-Rock flowers, which are coupled with subtle Shoegaze feathers, at times with almost Hard-Rock guitars, but then everything returns between those fingers that caress the strings with arpeggios that seize, closing our eyes to give us the security of being in a place that belongs to our dreams.

We need only open the door and that extraordinarily fascinating garden will be ready to welcome us. A marvellous record should be forbidden and instead you will be lucky enough to experience it with the free download.

So be rapacious, give free rein to the selfishness that dictates listening to music for free and freeze the rest to find the frost on your skin, in every season of your needs.

And while you're at it, do the trick again with his debut album DERELICT.

Meanwhile Secret Garden makes one cry out for a miracle, as it intoxicates, creating benches and paths in its perimeter to suspend time in a continuous listening. Be kind to the miracles because if they have chosen to show themselves to you, the least you can do is welcome them, embrace them and talk to them together: and, since there are ten of them here, give room for greed and binge because it will be a lunch you won't forget...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

27th January 2023

https://hauntingoctaves.bandcamp.com/album/secret-garden