My Review: The Sound - All Fall Down

 The Sound - All Fall Down

"There always comes a time when you have to choose between contemplation and action. That is called becoming a man." - Albert Camus, book The Myth of Sisyphus

Time is a boundary often full of misery, of exaggerations, of un resolvable notions that crush reason and thus the region of our ego, the one devoted to intuition and the capacity for clarity in becoming. Choices are made, limits are shifted, trust is buried and we give ourselves over to the crash: Adrian Borland knows all this and rushes into the vicinity of the now shredded pain and seduces it, takes it inside a complex circus of notes and words, as a shipwreck of the sigh, of the breath, of a flight into the water of its quiver. 

The result is a series of ingested pills, a cure for an unbearable toxicity: his purity of soul. Which must be destroyed, annihilated, led by the hand towards the abyss. Music then, the kind with mirrors in every sector of the soul, a clumsy viaticum for a sincerity that cannot be tamed, that certainly does not run the risk of being contagious. Here comes the rainbow of lucidity, with honest colours, without oil, without stain, pregnant with shining truths in a row, like a cloak that flies through the air better than a carpet, like a terrible choice of an unplanned intelligence, found, and not by chance, within an artistic path that had had two palaces built in the musical scenario of a historical moment unprepared for the quality of its probe, an uncivil thermometer for many, which instead brought to light the oil of shame. Unable to escape from himself, he had placed his trust in the acceptance of others: a total failure, for which his guilt is still not certain today

With the third album his depression began. It was from this episode that it became clear how unbearable things, as they were, were for him. This work started with a swear word, verbalised inside their rehearsal room: FUCK OFF!

Anger and frustration, helplessness and remission, pain and conviction that the end of their dreaming phase, of their youth, had begun. 

The enemy had been identified, that which was not functional to their vitality, undeniable, and songs were born as revenge, revenge, demonstration, a self-love with eyes marked by wrinkles, copious and hateful tears, to be sunk into sonorous liquids.

The fall, already present in the title, is in fact the starting point for a necessary, due, educated irony to teach souls: all the pills present here (as many as ten, bordering on a veritable addiction) are the fruit of Adrian's mental laboratory, connected with the exercise of one who faces his greatest enemy, which is not yet his tortured self, what will happen later, when darkness will extinguish his sweet eyes, because his existence will no longer be able to see the majesty and intensity of colour gradations. You listen to this work and enter a waiting room, endless and slow, where voices do not need screaming exasperations, but rather a beacon that deafens the rawest anger, in which especially Post-Punk had decided to take up residence. You find yourself, thus, and not by chance, renting your time to listen to tracks that sow suspicion, mistrust, abandonment and in which what stands out most is the cult of secluding oneself, alone, in the map of daily toil, a curtain ever so laboriously kept open.

There are four of them, producing, playing, being active members of a sludge-filled bin thrown towards the arrogance of the market, of a record company, of the press, of a war-mongering Premier, of a social distance that offers glitter but no light. An album of opposition, where the key lies in the continuity of music as the muse of reflection, of truths that come out and take the air on the balcony. Experimentation, jam sessions, analysis of small parts to be jammed into a sound devoted to gloom, to a frightened mood that desperately seeks leave from the hypothesis of success because, and this is evident, this album is a white flag in the black of vulgarity, waved with little strength. Intense, naked, raw, it sweats and makes thoughts drift to a consequential choice: 'with us or without us, love us or leave us alone'.

Heavy (kilos of glycerine and tar inside), seductive (thin grams of sweetness make it unique), magnetic (the magnetism of the compositions can lead us to delirium), it makes all these elements the high point of their career: how beautiful it is to dive into the void with ten beautiful creatures and lose a part of oneself.

The old scribe invites you to look up what was coming out at record level in those months, to think about how everything had lined up towards indulging in nothingness, denying oneself in order to achieve success. Forget dignity, everything was happening, to the delight of the foolish. Adrian and co. were not lost in this nonsense, because they were focused on seeking the sanctity of the truth, on distinguishing and offering it. It is a fact that this All Fall Down is a lie, a total crap, a shameful act, a profound injustice for those who could not make room within themselves, not obliterating everyday life with splashes of fearless madness, in the Turkish bath of vulgarities, expelled without restraint. Here everything hurts, it dirties, for the mechanical construction of the rhythms, the stripped-down melody, enriched with continuous suspensions, with the lights of a chimney that works ceaselessly. The Sound have never been so attentive to the cells: you can tell by the song form, which for the first time is disturbed by inserts, arrangements and attempts to make itself uncomfortable first, a laboratory with the aim of doing an autopsy as it is born...

Notice how the Pop side is deliberately vulgar and perpetually targeted by aesthetic and moral pressures, with Post-Punk acting as an unexpected master, calm, reflective, to educate the song to be 'less simple'. The formula of the composition becomes deliberately broad, it is not the genre but the message that is put at the centre of the rehearsal room, and not the writing, which never as in this record lives on necessities that draw the listener towards that devastating situation that is becoming aware of the truth, where nothing is in contact with reality. Songs that are sponges, slow, some instead capable of drawing us into the tried and tested system of dance, in which words disturb the joy of movement, in which serenity is not called upon, in order to find ourselves in the space of continuous stop-and-go, physical but above all mental. Echoes of Ultravox run through the backbone of several episodes of the album, while everyone searches for and finds (is it a coincidence? I don't think so) links to Joy Division, because one always stops at what is closest, what costs the least effort. But The Sound play at home, look to John Foxx and his magnificent band, and make the unforgivable mistake of wanting to give creations the chance to escape from the complicity that banality offers. All of this is cause for unquantifiable, let alone intuitable, riches, since genius, if it works hand in hand with a projectuality that wants to stun the infamous power of the market, can only glide into the territory of individual wealth, without the certainty of corruption. This is what the album does: it separates vice, and the consequent loss of equilibrium, from the magnificence of an unhinged and therefore free thought, where, however, no happiness is evident to represent.

The only one who was aware that he was inside the circuit of surrender was Adrian himself, in what can definitely be called his first solo album. The atmosphere of the places is in constant contact with the light of a melancholic dawn, at which every explosion of colour becomes suffering and a source of disturbance. Here the dream comes to an end, the desire to create music as an act of joy and conquest is extinguished, it is instead taken to the salon of the soul where what is born is already cause for pain, for a genius working on how to anaesthetise all this. It is precisely for this reason that the old scribe does not hesitate to define the set of songs as the most nourishing for those who want to abandon the mediocrity of speed, of selfishness that does not contemplate the sweat on the brow of one's soul. All Fall Down was a mission for Adrian: to feed deception to the lions, to make them chew on it, and so it did, to an excruciating delight that made The Sound the bravest band of the eighties. What this has to do with existence is well explained by the ten tracks present: stay away from the itches and feed on the flight, the conscious one, which will lead you to make of this experience the authentic need not of friends, but of healthy punches in the face because where a bruise lives you often find the best ally who then caresses your heart…

There are sound games that many would waste time searching for the root of. But what the hell: can we realise that what brings a smile to your face here is, after all, a scream, a gentle one, that remains so? It's not Post-Punk, it's not Darkwave, it's not anything that could fall into the jaws of a vulture skilled in provocation: what you're listening to is the avant-garde of a future that was soon to come, and Adrian had foreseen it and put it on record, in times not to be suspected…

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

5th April 2023

https://open.spotify.com/album/3NoUegvQ2S8fUtLK6bPbUl?si=zgoGykb6R8-Wix_Yny2a7g