My Review: Second Layer - Courts Or Wars

 Second Layer - Courts Or Wars

London called us and that time there was no escaping it: that band wrote an album absolutely capable of taking us into its Post-Punk drifts, hallucinated and dazzled by artefacts that include wild electronics and a gothic implant to darken the thoughts, with an Industrial attitude without leaving too obvious a trace, in a perfect game of balances. But you know the most important thing? It was 1979, then also 1980, and it was a band made up of Adrian Borland and Graham Bailey, who simultaneously began to write the pages of Sound history. 

But this ensemble is majestic, a portal to absolute novelty, perfecting the Post-Punk that was bursting through the veins of artists halfway around the world in those months. Calibrated, volcanic, angular, it is a continuous duel between the guitars and the bass, taking the auditory apparatus and educating it in mystery and force. Those two would never again compose such sharp, disturbing tracks, like ice cubes thrown violently into the hold of the rock ship. Minimalist, convulsive, with the intention of sounding out possible alienating movements, it all suffuses in generosity, developing the feeling of fear from a clean face. Eleven episodes, a staggering more in the Sheffield scene than in the London one, in which rhythms know accelerations and the emergence of words moves to the notes for a crepuscular but rebellious work, in the magnificent sea of contradictions smelling of perfection.

Bitter, rebellious, with continuous flashes of uncontainable genius, Courts or Wars is the manifesto of beauty that scratches the future...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

12th April 2023

https://secondlayer.bandcamp.com/album/courts-or-wars