My Review: Loom - in the absence of something better e.p.

 Loom - in the absence of something better e.p.

Beauty dresses five branches of a fertile forest, in the extreme centre of pleasures that meet and manifest their power, reliability, meaning and value. They are songs, objects of work and of feeling life as a phenomenal opportunity to release thoughts within lights and shadows, triggering emotions, thoughts, in a luminescent dust that intoxicates the ugliness of existence and brings it to life.

Because this is what Loom do: they touch and touch the senses to induce them to snap to their feet and head for peace, refreshment of the soul and contemplation of the intensity of things. A resounding return: the maturity of the sound, the focus on structures from which the depth of their gaze can be understood, the melodic research that continues to be intent on containing feelings and words as fellow travellers. The four give us three new compositions and the two latest singles, for a game of sighs, of sadnesses that are delicate, that do not want to crush the breath inside a bell jar, but rather the opposite: the band from Kalmar has found a way to balance their immeasurable talent by fully revealing the entirety of their breath, in which opposites are deposited that not only attract but love each other, coming out to let their lungs take in air in need of colour. Here then are slow, fast, dark, cheerful songs, in the blend of their highly recognisable style, capable of shaking the coldness of our thoughts and covering them in velvet.

They have grown up, taken their talent and slammed it against the wall: out of it has come a thick liquid of intoxicating perfumes, in five distinct fragrances, and now our body can feel enveloped in beauty...

Let us get to know it all, to experience the joy of human beings falling into the arms of the four Swedes, sirens with enchanted voices and capable of absorbing any resistance...

Song by Song

1 windowbath

The shoegaze cloud enters the woods, slowly opening its arms and delivering the first walk. The modality of Evelina's song is a pain in search of a listening: she finds it in the compactness of the guitars, nourishing and transversal, and in the games of suspension of rhythm, where the bass emerges, and then away, the reverberations light up, everything becomes sacred, a procession that incorporates several voices and elevates the song as queen of transformation

2 a beautiful beginning of an end

Released in July last year, the song loses its intro, making it gain in compactness and speed, immediately throwing us into its Alternative and Shoegaze vortex, in the chiaroscuro of a conscious sadness, in which the sigh is a pleasant aggression of rising tears, as is the music, a portal of sparkles given by the guitars of Fredrik, master of sound poetry, who harnesses the guitar like a gentle weapon with which he can delicately explode his talent. The drumming is an enthralling nervous mixture, a kiss to the nineties, Alternative Americana zone, and then it all clicks together. It cries running...

3 wishes fade to dust

The keyboard in Loom is a kiss from the gods, absorbed in the talent and the rain of scratches rising from those keys. And it is a struggle to resist the dripping of the heart: because the singing squeezes it, the bass crushes it, the guitar, wave of a nameless ocean, shows itself subtle and delicate. On the rhythm changes the Swedish band are now aware of how much can be done and this is what they make you hear in the song, a powder keg that shows the Sad Pop side, between Dreampop rustles with a face full of pain and the knowledge that to be able to touch their strings is to rise to the sky. A miracle that in the end will leave your thoughts wet with awareness...

4 let us disappear

It's back to the early nineties, when music was looking for carefreeness, crutches for gentle days and the desire to stay in touch with an inner melody. Remarkable work on the guitar sound, which while scratching manages to be soft, handing over to the drumming and bass for a ride where shoegaze sighs respect the general mood, without encroaching on the pop lane.

Psychedelia appears for brief seconds, showing once again how the band's songs are arms open to different possibilities.

One dances with open eyes with the desire to say goodbye to the world, to sharing, to find peace within oneself...

5 the dream is over

For the song that closes the EP, the old scribe reproposes part of the review he wrote on a night filled with tears and joy, in heavenly exhaustion... 

"A lyric that makes the tears slide from the brain to the tip of the toes: a new salt lake in which to dive, in which to find the dreams paralysed by a reality that opposes, oppresses, kicks to reach the goal of extinguishing even the sturdiest of faiths.

In a corollary of shimmering guitars, capable of being rhythmic and dazzling, we dance hunched over but reassured by Evelina Nicklasson's miraculously angelic voice that rises and falls like her words, tattooed on the rhythmic precipices of Fredrick Axelsson, the guardian of every murderous impulse, because we often come to believe that feedback and its wah-wah are sharp knives aimed at defending us from senseless gestures. But one might think instead that it is actually causing them: a mystery of music, to be contemplated.

Roland Klein, Henrik Viberg and Eddie Wilmin (producer and assistant musician) are the masons who raise the sound system to lead it to the sky, in a chant that reaches the emotion with virulent and melancholic splashes.

And it drowns in a fugue that defeats all intentions, with the Baltic Sea blessing the poignant song with a telluric tremor that will inhabit your ecstasy coloured with Nordic tears, perfect..."

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

6th April 2023

https://loom2.bandcamp.com/album/in-the-absence-of-something-better-e-p