My Review: The Secret French Postcards - Life Got Claws

 The Secret French Postcards - Life Got Claws

Two countries shake hands, for an artistic union that sows urban fragments and is constantly devoted to dark and radioactive dance.

The Swedes TSFP and the German label Cold Transmission Music strike  a deal to make the earthly path truthful and credible, an account of the daily spasms with elegance in the sounds, filled with Darkwave stabs and contemplating the support of that Coldwave that knows how to become as warm as a kiss from Lucifer.

What we are going to listen to is something powerful, transversal and oblique, representative of needs and propensities that have been trying to enhance consensus for decades, like a spokesman of manifest adhesions to musical fascinations born between Belgium and England, which then landed in the Slavic countries and Eastern Europe. Music that generates introspection and abandonment, dreams cloaked in essential propaedeutic attitudes. The Portuguese Pedro Code, undisputed priest of the prodigious IAMTHESHADOW, here steps into the control room as a producer and head of mixing, giving the Swedes a deserved and necessary added value.

One has deep admiration for this work that condenses messages and qualities into an expanse of rumbles and fragrances that stun, a unicum that is only considered as such if one has the intention of studying in depth what the massive musical production offers. Here we find ourselves in the presence of champions, mastiffs and thoroughbred horses that bite and run through the territories of sadness with growing capacity...

Something essentially necessary comes out of the amplifiers of these seemingly glacial souls, to contour and perturb our mental palaces: the Swedes play seriously with brushes, reducing the palette at their disposal, but perfectly outlining the areas they are interested in for a set of songs that can also be the ideal frame to look at on days when thought struggles to be precise. But the tracks are sonic and emotional investigations, conductors of thinking dances, analytical sessions that reveal truths we often wish to deny.

From The Cure to Ultravox to Echo & The Bunnymen, via Sheffield and Belgrade, everything piles up and makes visible the origin of magic that does not melt. But then these enchanters decide that it is necessary to sow their own mark and therefore all the compositions come to expand, to convince them to have a strong personality without too many debts with the past.

Feelings appear as a long list, as numerous are the stylistic fascinations, perfectly compacted, almost hidden but recognisable with careful listening. And it is a green light for a grey, conscious and constructive joy. It is music of multiple capacities, assorted identities absorbed in a momentum that leads to dance steps that show reality.

The voice is never emphasised, almost kept hidden, yet it is able to arouse emotion, aspects that join with the sound, a leaden but effective viaduct in keeping us company, in revealing itself as one of us, in the embrace between creator and host. Let us move on to kiss these songs, for a marriage that I wish you to celebrate within yourselves…

Song by Song 

1 - The Way You Move

We enter the room of moves, of life, of strategies, of the necessities of life, of observation, with Olli Ohlander's voice putting itself on the same level as the music: the volume, the mixing makes everything compact, for this guitar that moves with black-grey trajectories. The initial bass will be the basis of a Post-punk belonging that will find during the track the game of alternations which make it perfect to start the album.

2 - Parasite

We dance again, more and more bent into the early 80s, with guitar and synth as an ancient couple who know themselves well and produce oiled and working beams of sadness. Coldwave echoes, in the decadent direction of a sick and delicious seduction towards a musical language that defines validity and depth.

3 Sad Like You

A new One Hundred Years, but only in the very first few seconds and lightened up, immediately finds a way to move away from the uncomfortable comparison to find its own soul with amazing vocals. At the synth comes the wizard of IAMTHESHADOW to give the track an effective cloud full of crows and scratches on the skin. Poignant, remarkable, it produces pleasant pain. 

4 - Strain 

We find again the hypothesis of The Cure to caress suggestions that seem to be heading towards 1981, in southern England. But then Strain becomes a glacial, delicate and murky meteorite.

5 - Don't Fear Me

Here we are at the diamond point, at the eclipse, at a change of mode and stylistic perspective, at the point of contact with their past that nevertheless contemplates a leap forward: the band's future starts from this gem, from the darkness that is traversed with a singing-recitation of enchanting beauty. And the music is a walk through anxieties and tensions, with the melodic piano held together by a style that needs no comparison: it is to them that all the credit goes.

6 - Dreaming At Last

After the diamond, the masterpiece of this record: all the richness of a dreamlike compression finds accommodation in the interplay of dynamics that are perfect. Darkwave bites its teeth, Coldwave defends itself, resulting in the splendour of the only human victory: dreams. And no better dream than a musical one can travel between night and dawn.

7 - Sides

Sides is the song with the most melodic weight on this album: a ride through the streets of musical genres that embrace each other and then Olli's voice that is a melancholic chill that lightly burrows into the skin, but ultimately reaches the centre of our hearts. Almost on the verge of Gothic pop, the song has all the characteristics to light up dance floors.

8 - Complete Confusion

It's hard to believe that TSFP can be fierce and dramatic, but here we are in front of a mirror with multiple pieces of glass that make everything clear, in spite of the title: a song that produces addiction and clarity, because in the muffled sense of the instruments a radioactive power emerges, perfect and necessary. And the refrain is essential frenzy.

9 - Go Away

Haunting, like ravenous weeds, like a rock climbing towards the sky, Go Away is the lightning bolt that the old scribe recommends everyone to listen to: forty years of splendid attitudes summed up in 93 seconds. It is jubilation and we all walk away satisfied by these sounds and the muffled circle of light.

10 - A Searching Kiss

We come to the conclusion with a song that slows down the rhythms, but which is able to give tons of suggestions thanks to a rotating guitar and a drum machine that thickens the Coldwave soul of a fairy tale which kisses desires and shows the romantic side, although throughout the album the Swedes have not spared themselves, also showing love petals. But if the need to open our eyes to hostile reality was evident, here we kiss and dream ...

Alex Dematteis

Musicahockworld

Salford 

8th January 2023

https://thesecretfrenchpostcards.bandcamp.com/album/life-got-claws