My Review: Blood Moon Wedding - American Nightmare

 Blood Moon Wedding - American Nightmare

There is a dutiful embrace fixed in periwinkle-coloured waves, containing travails that must be told, evaluated and finally pushed towards a consciousness that cannot escape it.

If it happens through the art of music, the din can become unbearable, especially if it is done by two souls with their hands firmly planted inside reality, as they shake it up, insult it, reveal its murky secrets and consequences that one often does not want to see.

Mia and Steve take on the burden, they dig into this daily cataclysm and, like a pair of carpenters, smooth out what would like to remain rough and give it an upright, precise moral shape, with wounds coming out of thick, pendulous wrinkles. They do not play at economy, they use words like unscrupulous bulldozers, like heartless scalpels, because they know that what must be done cannot have temptations, stutterings and inaccuracies. 

The old scribe listens, studies, standing on the bridge created by these artist-strategists and walks inside music that throughout the album are continuous windless tombstones, proceeds to meet their courage, the adult determination that does not seek favouritism, probably deciding in advance that the last thing that counts is success, what is fundamental is a conscience capable of ceasing to play the fool. 

They work with their helmet, their rifle, they shoot at the dust of inebriated thoughts, they shake and tug at those who have slumbered over the years, and they advance, song after song, arrow after arrow, bullet after bullet, with the tattoo of their compositions on their skin that ignites every time it finds no opposition. 

Their artistic past allows no doubts: always active, reflective, with their hands like perpetual fists, they throw themselves into this marriage of notes and words, red-hot the airspace that starts in Oakland and arrives in Bath, thus creating the only Anglo-American coalition that bears the fruits of thought within a field of action where the result is an awareness that can no longer be missed.

Sadness here becomes a weapon, an asset, the beginning that throws the sky into joy: two human beings spread their shoulders and embarked on a crazy but perfectly successful feat. Like psychologists wit

hout reticence, they examined the corpse of human minds, even reaching into their nightmares, and teased, stimulated a reaction, threatening with quintals of rock and gothic folk to allow no escape. An anarchic punk that is slowed down and not anachronistic, but perfectly topical, emerges fearless and overbearing, as it must, to crumble useless existences. 

The singing is recitative, soaked in drama and boiling oil, it scratches and breaks the heart and mind, as fearless insidiousness, comes out of the manholes and soars on the flight to a precise point where everything must be heard. Mia and Steve share stanzas, sometimes sharing them, and chills arise like inevitable fires. The music continually hangs by a thread, they seem to be able to fall into the void, and they do so without exaggeration, with the maturity that is only allowed by experience full of talent. The settings are the fruit of studies, of sleepless nights, of days used not to lose anything: all the instruments come out of wisdom and responsibility, nothing can be wasted and the suggestions are merciless tanks.

Mia Dean wounds: the beauty of her vibratos, her high notes, the ups and downs of her vocal registers are masterpieces that bring tears and unstoppable fears, melting our bad listening, ridiculing, because her class is infinite but above all necessary. In her throat dwells the richness of one who sows certainties, has pins and pots of flowers that coexist as her writing enters the notes and explodes into the sky.

She succeeds in giving the voice a dress in which a witch and a fairy converse, converging in a strategy in which everything must emerge, a blood pact that emerges ceaselessly in every song.

And so it is that we feel the urgency, the rage kissing the calm, and the cleverness of words defeating reality.

Steve, rumble of thunder with his unique and therefore recognisable modes of expression, has returned for this project, and has cast himself in the role of a narrator with a reddened uvula, full of sadness but with his fists embedded in every syllable, a shaman with scimitar and incense, an actor of rituals and inveterate agitator, a wayfarer who throws your illusion to the ground and kills it with his song.

Exaggerated, irrepressible, he knows how to become the shadow that terrifies, he advances with that vibrant plate of his that from the 1970s to the present day has been pregnant with murderous bacteria and intoxicating filthy sweetness.

Dynamitic, decadent, swaggering, aggressive, all that comes from him is a reflection of tense nerves, which are sure to create righteous discomfort.

We are about to enter into these ten oceanic waves that the two artists wanted, we will smell the scent of these compositions and the colours of lightning that will make the seasons a single long thunderclap with an often lashing voice, which, however, when it softens, manages to bring out a chance to breathe and make what was meant to be a smile.

A resounding album that will swim giving you nightmares, between America and England, with no room for manoeuvre. Surrender and suffer, with that one smile that will look back at you laughing…

Song by Song

1 - Spell

Mia Dean and Steve Lake's awareness swims with bitter lyrics and heavy music kept afloat by the melody of the American artist's singing that is truly sublime and light, almost close to the clouds, but then Zounds' leader, with his vocal part, brings the song back into our stomachs. 

Something magical and cloudy sticks to our ears: these are sensory oscillations that seduce and penetrate the mind. This duo launch a determined attack on our weaknesses, but perhaps a song can actually be useful to understand our surroundings and to lead us to growth. 

It is interesting to note that defining what you hear can certainly be of little use, but an attempt must be made.

Rock is dressed in the guitars of The Blue Aeroplanes of Jacket's Hangs with the roar of New Model Army, with the addition of a guitar solo that brings a post-punk modality capable of giving warm chills.

A back-and-forth between the two voices, between the two protagonists, and the story unfolds with this tense atmosphere that clings to us and refreshes the mind: we have a chance to listen to what will shape our thinking and it is one of the most beautiful gifts at the beginning of the year!

2 Some Things Are Worth Believing

The magic of a dark lullaby, a breath-killing synth, the two voices gravitating to the desert of a vanished happiness, the guitar wickedly taking dreams out of the drawer, and an electronic noise that keeps the song inside a cloak where colours seek an embrace. When they then sing in unison, at a high register, even the sky trembles...

3 Wanted 

A forest of desires compacts into a junkyard of tensions, magically blessed by almost devilish vocals, in the vicinity of the anger that has reason to be, in a state where everything seems catatonic, with the suspicions inside the sighs of Mia, a swampy angel-witch, and Steve, an obese devil with his tepidly acid crooning. A song full of free-falling lights, the world is shaken up, and this song sounds like the suspension of life, as it tries not to glide ruinously over useless vague... Clamorous!

4 Looking For Us

Time stands still here, in this frustration of melancholy, in the bombastic reminder of decades long gone by, which the two cleverly celebrate, using a theatrical, almost tribal modus operandi, to deliver us a path of slowed-down metallic tangles, in words that warm like lava held in the hand...

5 Murder Ballad

The ocean, the desert, the night, time, compressed thoughts: a journey inside an alarm, the decadent funeral march activates its splendour in a mantra song, pulsing with echoes in the swamp of existence, with a knife in its hand. Oneiric, in a different way than one might imagine, it is mocking for the pounds of slow vomit the two pour into our minds, and death bangs its nose against our desires...

6 Hey Mia Do You Remember

Gothic Folk lights its torch, the procession enters sturdy but slow in the streets of the night, the guitar and drums are accomplices in a delirium, as if the Virgin Prunes were peeling off their skin and escaping into the mystical aura of the pair, who here decide to dress the music in expectant lights…

7 Wild

Poignant, aggressive with roses bloodying on the ground, Wild is the cloud of chorality that shows how a song can be perfect without being a mass of chords and sounds. Here, the arrangement wins out, a piano and lopsided, weeping guitar. With an almost pop attitude, the enchantment lies in its ability to suggest imagery, to be a blindfolded muse, with the warm-sounding drumming giving everything else the approach of a set of words as unquestionable gospel

8 Blood Moon Wedding Part 1

If there is such a thing as the dance of the pungent winter atmosphere, the one that sedates summer memories, here it is, a slow lash of thorns on the skin. Heavy, harrowing, decadent, the vocals definitively take the sceptre and enchant: it reflects on a black, metallised thought, with guitars like sabres in the wind, in a noise ordeal that gives a bastardised peace...

9 Blood Moon Wedding Part 2

We should all learn from this bite, from this sledgehammer of a hallucinated bass as it burrows into the earth's subsoil, and from the drumming that prepares the entrance of the two masters with their desperate vocals, a trained scream within Post-Punk incandescences tamed by the mood so full of slow-motion Horror.

If you're looking for a winning musical genre, you'll fail intelligence: this is the rite of a marriage gothic in style and perfect in the content of diamond-cut and corrosive lyrics. 

10 PN M2-9

The last dart, amidst the vapours of an existence in leave-taking, is the idyll of voices celebrating the end, in black and torn clothes, in a continuous suspension, between the guitar in a folk but electric state of grace, the piano reciting the rosary and the keyboard enveloping the scene. Seeds of sweetness descend into the heart, but with the unfailing companion of misfortune standing close by in this track that cements perfection, concluding the work of two artists in a state of grace, two soul mates who seem to have been born of the desire of unknown divinities to give us the certainty that blood is the place where life gathers its misery... The album is the sweetest of stabs one can receive, and it is a pleasant pain, to the point of orgasm…

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

5th April 2023

https://bloodmoonwedding.bandcamp.com/album/blood-moon-wedding-an-american-nightmare