My Review: Sparkler - Big Sonic Chill

 Sparkler - Big Sonic Chill

When the old scribe chooses music to write about there is always an enchantment, an unconquerable fact that generates fascination and the certainty that it is all the attraction that justifies a review.

And when it comes to an album like that of the San Diego line-up, then surprise takes every pulsating vein and dips it in joy. After several singles here is a cataclysm, a thunderbolt, a brushstroke of light in grooves lit by dreamy shoegaze and glowing Dreampop. Songs inside a bubble full of distortions, vibrations, with the evident demonstration that these musical genres have a memory that does not allow dispersion: a record that protects thirty years is precious in itself. 

It is not for everyone, apparently, this Big Sonic Chill: the melody, present and sinuous, is within sonic motions that exalt shaggy nerves, it pulls at the hair with distortions and reverberations capable of putting lightning in them, and it is precisely for this reason that there will be people who will struggle to love it. No matter: the best things rarely reach the masses and, when they do, the mode is slow.

There is no doubt of the validity of this work: every note, every syncopation, every impetus, everything is the outpost of a consciousness that makes care for sound the defining sense of aptitude and passion for an artistic making that leads to the gates of paradise. Four horsemen for eight splinters: the drumming is a tear to be kissed, the softness and strength of the bass is the psychedelic syntax that kisses Noise, the guitars are a mixture of vibrations with the suitcase to visit the contortions that melt under their fingers.

Sparkler are a machine gun of momentum, a band composed of brakes made graceful by the lifeline of their poignant melodies, a gunpowder playing in the clouds: Softer Hold is here to represent it.

If you want to connect Dreampop and Shoegaze in a firm handshake, then listen to Silly Things and you will be in the history of these musical genres: a feedback in the middle section will spur you on and will be the glue to bind you to this band for all your future.

And what about Honeydrip? Shoegaze that struggles, scratches, floods the dream with windswept melodies and sweeps away fears that death might close its wings to this redundant river of clean-faced petals.

What you will find in the other songs is the certainty that appreciating, desiring and loving what you hear will already make you beautiful souls like these guys.

May it be an idyll of a prolific meeting of thoughts, because the album is a cream that kills bacteria: long live Shoegaze, long live Sparkler!

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

5th March 2023

https://sparklersd.bandcamp.com/album/big-sonic-chill