My Review: The Slow Readers Club - Knowledge Freedom Power

 

The Slow Readers Club - Knowledge Freedom Power

Where were we?

There are magics that lose altitude, approximations and illusions that steal space, in the ocean of confusion that erases reality and creates in the virtual a free access that not only confuses, diseducates and levels life with a conspicuous downward spiral, but also leads to a frantic race towards appearance.

The distance between people, this old lady, has its hours counted.

Can someone lend her a hand? Can you give her courage, support her?

Perhaps by partly using the same elements of modernity, perhaps just to apparently play the game with the aforementioned marked cards?

Yes, The Slow Readers Club can do it, and very well.

So ahead even of themselves, their latest album is their evolutionary masterpiece, the astonishing journey that spans their career and makes it a distant snapshot, to look at but no longer any relation.

The Manchester band is building a glass palace, a shimmer to show the mechanisms of the ideas and class available to become four chips connected to the future, not as a challenge or out of curiosity, but out of a need to be a solar system within the foggy cage of a present that can crush. No more sadness and lament: enough of propensity to make streams of discomfort accessible and stop with descriptions of what defeats life.

What is needed is the ability to create new paths, new heavens, new inclinations, bringing a design impetus that can create qualifying and different spaces. Hence the improvement/change that comes to music from their human identities. They sweep away the competition with an album that collects a mental sweat, an exercise in alternating sound, environment, and attitudes for a race that becomes radiant: they could have made their music commit suicide with repeated clichés, come up with hits like magnets. Instead, they have become a building site in the sky where the sun's rays kiss the darkness: Knowledge Freedom Power is a traffic light with green and yellow lights that keep the machine of their projects moving, between experimentations and oscillations that bring a polite scream inside us, between amazement and a gasoline to put in the engine of our needs. A new band that emerges already grown-up and oiled, that sprays enthusiasm and energy and overrides all friction. It is not mocking those who have always loved and followed them over the years, because the four Mancunians have always had respect for their loyal supporters, without giving up the possibility of a path that would reveal their artistic needs.

I would like to reassure those who fear that in all this positive identity, the sensibility associated with sadness, a certain decadence and healthy meanness have completely disappeared: it is all intact and perfectly balanced, magically, among the new forms of expression. 

The love of life, the sharing of evil, the perspective to be built, the sun and the dark find a table on which to create hypothesis, dense and precise arguments that allow all components the chance to manifest themselves: an album miraculous in itself for this reason alone. Euphoria is a weapon that the Manchester band uses at various times, leading the listener to smile and dream, to move away from the abyss, but the latter is used so as not to unbalance it towards excess.

This willingness to wander through the songs as if they were leaves composed of the same secret as the snakes is surprising: life is food, and to consume it one must approach it with the right weapons, strategies between the teeth, passing through sound patterns permeated by electronic musical mantles devoted to emphasis and a sweet manifestation of guitars with fog in their eyes but inclined to seek out the sun's rays.

The darkness, however, remains: it is part of a past that does not want to impose itself, let alone surrender, and struggles with its claws, which, as we will see in the song-by-song description, in some episodes shows its ardour, its nervousness, like a belly that has an old, kicking foetus inside it. 

The sounds are the true identity of the whole, a row of grapes ready to be picked for an immediate nectar that intoxicates and conquers, without hesitation. No longer “just” tracks, but beams, shrubs, roots, blades of ice with the right blanket to wrap the listener in an area where even the saddest shines with depth and immediacy. 

Joe Cross has put the quartet in the position of being polite soldiers in a gentle battle, in which the attitude of using synths as the main texture is combined with rock, with a willingness to weave melodies and rhythms that do not make one prefer one over the other, giving perfect joints. In this way the songs, one after the other, become a strong and delicate embrace, in which the rhythm often turns into a dance with eyes open to the future and a glance back, without losing balance.

The voice, throughout the album, is a tear that, having turned out to be solid and cold, warms the heart because in its diverse, more positive language, nothing can erase its skin: Aaron moves like never before, his flicks, his falsettos more melodic and even more powerful than in the past are continuous razor strokes. His quests to find harmonies and rhythms prone to conviction are crazy, as they are structured to stick in the mind, in a perfectly successful minimal metamorphosis, as if a small scalpel had been used to slightly alter the system we knew by heart. Shivers rush in, amazement takes over the stage never to leave it again and, song after song, those vocal chords of his become intoxicating runs, leading us to a boisterous, rebellious, highly successful song.

Their muscular dystopia is not dead, endangered or anything else, but is in the company of something that resembles the opposite to give the music a face full of nuances and unpredictable approaches, where the all known now becomes even more inflated, full of poetic mastery. Their best album awaits you, be sure to approach it with your eyes clear of any disquiet, because you will find it, often disguised, but always present. Slow readers now read faster, as the future can no longer be a matter to be ignored, and they have done this very well…

Song by Song

1.Modernise

Opening this work is a vigorous track, somewhere between old TSRC and Muse, with violent synths and a sumptuous bass, setting the tone for their sixth work. Stylistic variations, instrumental alternations are offered, riding rock and electronica with great passion and skill, with the chorus releasing the madness... 

2.Afterlife

A vibrant pearl conquers the listener, with the instrumental technique revealing more talent and direction, with its power to be grasped and assimilated, generously revealing their muscles inserted among the notes, making everything a hypnotic delirium.

Did you say they had changed? Were you afraid? Don't be silly (although change is legitimate): here you are within the walls of Manchester ready to leap through the streets of the world dancing, your skin sweating with sadness and the will to live in a difficult but possible coexistence. Extraordinary! 

3.Sacred Song

If the future is to be a place full of empathy and respect, Sacred Song is the right track to look at each other without rancour and laugh with awareness and maturity, the place where the senses will be surprised and the chewing of it all will take time if you are demanding and unable to accept the growth of these boys who have become men with time. We are in the presence of sunshine, of light, of energy given in a wild bundle of emotions that will win you over.

4.Lay Your Troubles On Me

You weep, you reflect, you lay your cards on the table, in this vessel in the ancient waters of Salford harbour. The vocals, the melody of the singing, Kurtis' guitar arpeggios, David's perfect drumming and Jim's straightforward bass make this song a peaceful cry, which will explode in your chest towards the end...

5.How Could YouKnow?

Astonishment has no limit, within the art of the Mancunians: here is proof of this in a subliminal phrasing, an elaborate way of planning the enchantment that dresses up to stack the deck. The song is the album's crossroad, the synthesis and development of an alchemy that needs listening, but will delight you once you brush its magical skin. A hymn that has grains of mystery, a liquid matryoshka that will find perfect condensation when it has reached your heart. Another moment when a composition can make sense within the immensity of a stadium for its enveloping chorus.

6.Knowledge Freedom Power

The first track released to announce the new album is a ride that knows little pauses, with the middle part becoming a hymn to awareness. The verse is, as always, a hypothetical refrain for many other bands, to establish once again that with them the musical genre is the least of one's worries, because one is enveloped in rock, electronic music, pop and a lot of joy that kisses the pain...

7.What Might Have Been

The old scribe's favourite song, without a doubt.

Everything goes eighties, majestic, giant, with the feeling that it could be the right track to identify their whole career, including a background that is not oblivious to The Smiths, who somehow seem to be there to applaud a “huge” creation. And Aaron's loving SOS finally conquers.

Power has a thousand forms and modes for these talented Mancunians, and here they reveal it all, showing how they can pull down the sky and fill it with earthly greatness...

8.Seconds Out

Human darkness shows its depths in the splendid eighth date, where one can have the feeling of being suffocated, imprisoned by one's own incapabilities. It all comes back, their DNA is algebra, feathers of pain popping out of the pillow to interrupt our sleep. 

And as if inside an unstoppable natural catastrophe, all the senses seem to be displaced and lost. As if to say: when all you have to do to have a cardiac arrest is listen to a song....

9.Forget About Me

The Starkie brothers find a way to be impetuous with subtlety, in an extraordinary exercise that at one point reveals David's conspicuous improvement with his sunny, energetic drumming.

Not to mention those moon-kissing synths.

10.No You Never

All the band's past comes together in the last track, in terms of style and musical reference, but once again something pulsating, immediate, necessary, sticks its head out to woo what is sure to be the song that will bring everyone together. The apotheosis must always manifest itself at the end....

To conclude: programming and genuineness, talent and strength, fantasy and drama held by the dribble. All this makes it possible to say that the record that can teach you a lot is right in your hands...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

24 February 2023

https://open.spotify.com/album/5Hjrk5ZrtyQgt0MDzdT6nu?si=NBTijMMKTAmNT7z_SSJEbw