My Review: European Ghost - No Peace, No Sleep, No Shelter

 European Ghost - No Peace, No Sleep, No Shelter

There is a wonderfully dark Italy, which knows how to distinguish itself between sadness printed as if by an inevitable cliché and assorted banalities without restraint.

From Bologna, a city with a long memory and capable of using forces of its own that prove to be effective, comes a band full of inspiration and immense quality that, starting from the deepest and most articulate literature, arrives at atmospheres laden with wisdom and capable of leading the matter of sleep into territories that include not only dreams, but the meaning of what should be a simple and dutiful night's refreshment. But they do much more: they find the soul of it all and show it to us.

And if the starting music, as a dutiful initial cue, is that of the Darkwave of the last ten years, if we pay attention we might notice that everything is imbued with an older mantle, with a great ability not to show itself too much, but which gives these eleven songs a dress that hints at the physical features of genres that do not know how to die, giving through these mature guys the pleasantness and usefulness of seeing forty years of grey clouds moving within that part of the world made of notes that knows how to resist. And does not want to give in.

The least Italian band of all (yes, in this case an enormous and well-deserved compliment), gives lessons in class to many of the international ones, due to their careful and methodical work, capable of using influences and creating others in turn, ending up writing an album that is a riding ivy, grey and black, and that exposes itself to rays of sunlight that delude themselves into diminishing its intensity. But at its core, this bundle of nocturnal senses resists and lives out its mission not caring about anything: authoritative and militant in the area of research and artistic expression, it swaggers into rooms ready to dance and seek sleep without sleeping...

Undoubtedly a path of abandonment towards existence, its places, its people, with a necessary closure on the one hand of every relationship and on the other the pleasant encounter with a delirium that only comes from the clash with nightmares.

Obscenely beautiful, this record takes the sacrosanct right to give us the middle finger: there is nothing about these songs that the average Italian would know how to appreciate. So one wishes on the one hand, Buon Viaggio, and on the other, secretly binges non-stop.

The scribe favours the second option, don't you?

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

9th February 2023

https://icycoldrecords.bandcamp.com/album/icr090-european-ghost-no-peace-no-sleep-no-shelter