My Review: Tide Bends - Your Story

 Tide Bends - Your Story

New York is bad for the skin, good for the heart, it is damaging for the central nervous system, it goes with any colour, but in the end when we talk about music there is no doubt: a lot of it comes and goes from there. And, with a few exceptions, the quality is always enormous.

Then, in front of songs like Your Story, one can only bless the melody, the voice, the music that is born as a result of it, in our enlightened chests, inside the thoughts that become multiple and our thanks fill the river of emotions that gets bigger and bigger, listen after listen. What is the magic that brings pain as you melt into an embrace with the sky?

The answer is in the three hundred and seventy-four seconds of a story that illuminates the morbidity of repeated listening, out of necessity, out of distraction, and it is mostly because of the guitar.

Tide Bends creates a mood imbalance, with this guitar texture that, starting from a marvellous shoegaze matrix, goes off the rails, slips into a psychedelic puddle in the north of the United States and takes us with it to soil us with pure, even if contaminated, beauty.

Everything becomes corrosive but with a smile that leads to abandonment: the rhythm section is perfect, and no, it is not a miracle, Dan Nolan on drums has the psychedelic school in his drumsticks and the salty rhythm of Surf Rock. Gary Zampini on bass is the sensuality of the intelligent force that doesn't press to make noise, but touches his strings gracefully creating a roar in us. Then to conclude, the trio is completed with Dave Hough, guitar and vocals, the magician, the jerk to whom much is owed: a song like this without this guitar would be a good song, not bad right? He makes it perfect, in its minimalism are revealed doses of ocean that arrive in the city of the Big Apple, as in an apocalyptic movie. But what is the song if not a film where the vision provokes upheavals of unexpected peace? There is no joy without tears...

When the guitar takes the shoegaze lanes and lets itself go, we can only surrender, because Your Story becomes our story, that of people lucky enough to be able to enjoy this flow of energy that blows away the superfluous to show us all its mastery...

But if there is a secret, it is that they are guided by an angel who suggests to them not to fossilise in artistic choices and to free the brushes of the heart to capture the mystery...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld 

Salford 

23rd January 2023

https://tidebends.bandcamp.com/track/your-story