My Review: Cerulean Veins - Black

 Cerulean Veins - Black

On Valentine’s Day when we celebrate love, a couple decide to give us quintals of loving motions through an album that is a clear manifestation of resounding artistic growth, managing to invent a gothic joy within a tank full of movements seemingly filled with shadows and darkness, but which in the end dances offering us smiles and rays of sunshine in our hearts.

The band from San Diego, composed of Dustin Frelich and Amanda Toombs, record their perfect, intoxicating album with a series of songs that are nourishing, give energy and contradict those who consider the musical genres they offer as destined for depression, victimhood and a gloomy point of view. All this is preserved here as a precious element, but it does not dominate, it does not succeed in making us wish for a gothic pessimism, but rather an aware appreciation for life, precisely because they are not oblivious to concreteness, they are immensely connected to reality, however the music they offer ultimately illuminates the darkness in a warm and dynamic embrace.

A pop but powerful palette, marked by those poisonous drops of shadows that cannot be missed. The duo's maturity consists in not being complicit in repeated clichés, but in seeking a proposal which bypasses history, at least their own, to reveal that in their veins Post-Punk pulses renewed, that their distinct Darkwave and Coldwave propulsion here undergoes a facelift, a decisive settling towards the diminution of the electronic part with wonderfully simple keyboards that are balanced to give the guitar, drums and bass the role of absolute rulers. So our thanks are mandatory to Amanda, who, with discretion but great professionalism, distributes her grace with measure and elegance. For his part, Dustin is a series of muscles in touch with poetry, with his guitars full of rhythm and gently murderous orchestrations, to which we obey, giving them our adoration. The bass, often held under the skin, reveals an absolute mastery in the exaltation of melodies while managing to make a valuable contribution to rhythms that never before as in this album smell of a sublime interlock between the necessity of dance and the sensual side of softness.

You pause, you take note that the two of them wanted to paint their style with freshness, keeping their formula of searching for catchy tunes unchanged but, never before, they almost succeed in doing so by altering the traits of their deep mystery, and this is the main magic that makes this work so powerful and essential. One breathes stories, one participates in the writing of a perimeter of destiny that they have deformed, bent and then straightened to become the basis of a near future, but in the meantime their present is made of polite tension, directed towards the beauty of songs that kiss the rainbow, without shame. It is right and just to point out that nothing sounds more credible than a band that has always tried to give dance a more intimate value and now takes it into the confines of large stadiums, huge squares, inside supermarkets and above all in the lanes of heaven, because the ten tracks are golden-haired pirates capable of standing in the wake of every great dimension. 

The lyrics, co-written by both of them, bring nightmares to live inside dreams, finding in reality a magical aura, dangling between need and fantasy, like a diamond dipped in ocean water. And it is indeed an album built on the back of those waves, because it sensuously makes the songs glide through time: forty minutes of abandonment to the pleasure of a physicality that is combined with mature and constructive thoughts.

The sadness, which is certainly not to be missed, is given the keys that open the door to desires for life that Amanda and Dustin hold in the palms of their renewed propensity through not wanting to refuse the cohabitation of extremes that are inevitable. Here, the album is a home in the waves of reasoned, illuminating and non-destructive chaos, giving a great lesson to all, like a table from an ancient writing that we had denied ourselves to read.

Capable of accomplishing feats not even imaginable, the interplay between music and lyrics also makes it clear how the production is able to give everything equal importance. Succeeding. 

Then Dustin's voice and inimitable style are the magnets, the killer whales that bite into our flesh, making it obedient, in a certain and effective yielding, because this man is blessed with an unquestionable talent and a professional search for melodic textures which enchant our listening. We can’t escape from this romantic impulse that is provided by the vibration of his unique vocal chords that, mixed with vigorous lyrics, result in an almost explosive joy in us.

The most obvious ability of these nine dancing babes and one on a swing at the very end of the album is that of being a delirium with multiple faces, a ten-tailed snake always bent on showing tremors and fears with open arms, for a plunge into darkness without fearing death. Here, the two are the perfect heirs to bands that have tried to do this, but they are the ones who hit the target. 

Knowing how to take the history of grey and black music, respecting it, but throwing it into colourful highways is a titanic feat, and the result is under the blows of powerful and perfect drums, in the bass that like a dragon throws flames on guitars that are bound to be sparkling. Who cares what genre of music we are talking about: in listening there is an unquestionable seizure of stupidity, because they inhabit the intelligence that turns its back on the predictable, on that which is tired and incapable of providing truth.

When an artistic work makes one ask questions, suggests answers, allows itself a mysterious zone that is not abstention but reflection, then we can safely say that the perfect album exists and it is this Black, reigning for a near future that in any tragedy will still have its conscious smile…

Song by Song

1 - Infinite Love

From the very first notes, between the rusty voice and simple chords, you can sense that we are in front of an innovation. The rhythm arrives, the guitar sinks its nails and with the refrain the smiles open, amongst tears and thoughts searching for a net. A mini guitar solo reveals how Cerulean Veins have a good historical memory of that American Post-Punk of the 90s that did not have much luck. The song is a tattoo in the shape of a scar that embraces feeling even if it is suffering. When power and melody get married, love can only be infinite...

2 - Love Won't Save Us Now

Disruptive in rhythm, with skin-scratching guitar swings, and Dustin Frelich's usual, commanding, marvellous voice making listening a delight with dancing tears. When verse and refrain coexist as a legitimate consequence of a fiery, passionate flirtation, what ensues is a gloomy well-being that leads to the pinnacle of unstoppable enjoyment. He and his wife Amanda Ashley Toombs pilot and direct this band into territories where conscious glances cling to the need to organise time in a bubble in which to hold one's breath. It happens, then, to impact on the story of the failure of love, which will not save, will no longer protect people, and to convince us of this they do so by writing a song that, urging us to move relentlessly in our living spaces, will take away some of the pain but not the awareness.

3 - Dancing With Shadows

Showing fears and finding the power to dance, as dreams lead to love and nothing sleeps, we find ourselves to be moving bodies in the uncomfortable territory of the shadows but, to the song's credit, nothing is the enemy. An example of how a few chords and a powerful arrangement are enough to make a track a perfect lover. And here is the gothic joy that distributes intense electric shocks, guitars trained to be harpoons of the mind and the voice that among echoes, reverberations and its powerful tonsil, opens the way to a dance floor waiting for inebriated bodies.

4 - Tempted Hearts

Initial heart attack: were the American Joy Division born? No, don't worry, it's just the class of this artistic couple who know how to tease, how to make thanks of a now distant past and then even escape from themselves. And after a few seconds we find a few cells of Ado, their second album, reminding us where the San Diego band comes from. But then: swirls of drums and guitars like snares demonstrate the amazing path where melody must always bring a tear into unhappiness. You sing with your hands on your head, while your legs go away to dance a Post-Punk gem coloured with Pop. Nuclear, pleasantly devastating.

5 - Inescapably Loveless 

Wayne Hussey observes: perhaps he could use the American band for inspiration. The ideas here show the brilliance, the attitude to write a song that bypasses Darkwave and takes us to the garden of the heart, with the rhythm that jumps, changes speed, giving the bass the throne of the slap and then with the refrain you can be happily sad.

6 - Only The Love

The perfect place for this track is on the street, where it can run and bring its Rock, Pop and Post-punk flames to oxygenate the ears, because this is a song that has distant roots and is irresistible in the chorus with its inclination between the French 80s and the classic American form of disinterest in all that is fast-paced. Instead, the melody doesn't need excess to be penetrating and to create heights of absolute pleasure.

7 - Forever Tonight

The perfect moment, the result of their hard work is fulfilled in this sonic delirium, the summa of a career that touches the sky: one cries while dancing in the echoes of Psychedelic Furs, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Sound and a lot of Cerulean Veins' class that here, amid semi-acoustic guitars, rhythmic guitars and regal arpeggios, keyboards that with two notes give infinite flights and a splendid work of rhythm changes, produces the greatest embrace between the 80s and the 2000s.

8 - Dance Human Dance

Here their penultimate album Blue echoes, showing us how the electronic and Coldwave sides can still coexist, in a state of grace that does not forget its own DNA. Between Kiss (I Was Made for Lovin' You), Blondie and Talking Heads, the track finds its voracious pop dimension.

9 - Nothing Left But Love

The Psychedelic Furs return in the first few seconds of the track and in the attitude of a song that opens its feathers while the rhythm presses and dominates everything, making itself capable of slowing down and accelerating, with precise and volatile drumming and guitars like pleasant scratches on the skin of a spirit that, resigned, finds love within itself. Spectacular example of their multifaceted stylistic ability.

10 - Love Will Remanin

All Black is filled with love and the end affirms what will forever remain in darkness: its power to stay intact and ever powerful. And here we come to the only song that only apparently doesn't need a swirling rhythm because, if you listen carefully, there is a complicity in vocals and in the short guitar with its Post-Punk stains that makes our hearts beat faster, since emotions weep on our skin here. When we comes to a robust crescendo in the final part and the drums become a tribe within the darkness, then you can understand how this album is simply a marvel that finally gives the colour black the power to make us happy and not lead us to suffering…

Alex Dematteis

Muscishockworld

Salford

13th February 2023

https://ceruleanveins.bandcamp.com/album/black