My Review: Sun Shines Cold - echoes of a former life

Sun Shines Cold - echoes of a former life

Music can help us get to know places better, while not giving us absolute certainty: a necessary starting point to sweep away illusion and arrogance, to offer a mature complicity without being able to claim to really know how things are.

In his hands, the old scribe has a debut album that is absurd in its beauty, its importance, its propensity to transport the listener towards the lights, shadows, mists, races, and reflections of songs permeated with mystery and undoubtedly a bundle of intriguing suggestions. It is the work of two Scots who have painted the sky south of Edinburgh and blown strategic melodies on clouds that have enthusiastically welcomed this work, a manifesto of perfectly amalgamated sounds, with a powerful continuity, a sound film in which the images (as they should always be) remain in the mind and not in front of the eyes. What is astonishing is the undoubted ability not to create a musical genre, or a series, but to structure a path that expands the visual, auditory and sensory imagination, as if this container created a galaxy of dreams, where sweetness, bitterness, play, experimentation, doubts and impetuses can coexist in the same place. In short: a day in our existence, finished on a device through capturing waves and not in a photo album. The whole seems like a tale, chapters of the day, in which the perfect sequence of tracks certifies the passage of time.

Skilled modern minstrels, storytellers with perfect plots, Brian Jordan and Colan Miles layer the voice of the senses and feelings through a dense set of stories that make it possible to make the notes visible: this is the miracle of echoes of a former life, indisputably! A shock that makes the whole a process to be studied, in which musical genres are useless journalistic definitions.

Post-Punk, Shoegaze, Post-Rock, Alternative, Dreampop, Ambient: who cares! Would that be the reason for listening, what would make it feasible and desirable? Not at all!

One must learn to approach these compositions by denying oneself all knowledge, delirium, to give space to one's own silence to better understand the meticulousness of a painstaking work, where everything is positioned not only for enjoyment, but above all as a benefit to the soul, in a dreamlike encounter that hypnotises reality. This is not a manifestation of songs collected, summed up, thrown into a vinyl record, but rather the beginning of their greatness, the first track on a path that is made of vapours welcomed and then distributed, to penetrate into our bodies and minds, becoming a companion beat.

The record consists of a sensual use of guitars and synths, with the bass picking up the moods of the melodies and offering delicate and powerful support, depending on the situation. The drumming is mammoth: perfect for its blowing and bombastic shrieking oiled in dynamics. Now we just have to throw our silence into the charm-filled streets of this first album by the Scottish duo, to learn what beauty is...

Song by Song

1 Before

A cloud of sound opens this debut: a slow light approach, a disruptive bass, drumming that qualifies a feeling of drama that will be confirmed by a darkwave-skinned guitar, but what comes through is above all a bitter, expectant sweetness

2 tried so hard

A walk into questions, a friendly embrace, a glimpse of time upon us, and away into dreamy magnitudes in search of welcome. A slice of shoegaze, then Brian's voice renders us dutifully silent, and even the clouds are moved: clear proof that technique, design and development are capable of generating an enchantment like this...

3 floods

What is perfection? Floods...

It's hard to resist the lure of a tear dancing on the hump of a floating sensation that spans joy and sorrow like this song. Colan and Brian build up the mantle of every feeling and lead it to visit our most total rapture: from the 1980s to the present day, every toil in the world finds dutiful refreshment between these notes. The guitars raise their register, as does the singing, and the drums lead the way on this journey that will leave you with no choice but total emotion...

4 thoughts

A chat with the most ethereal Slowdive, a few beers, and then off they go: the duo has decided to beat the absence of thoughts with a sonic tale that alienates reality and invites you to create a photonic mental kennel, because you really do have the clear sensation of witnessing an invasion of light that illuminates only positivity, giving, as a result, a very rich energy to be consumed in full...

5 there came a rain

Something dies, perhaps life itself, but the old scribe instead thinks the song is a complex worship of our earthly pilgrimage, in this slow and manifest skill of peculiar attentions to progressions, leading up to the refrain that is a heart-tightening diamond of awareness

6 falling

The tempo picks up but everything seems to become more ethereal, giving the impression of a visit to eternity. The singing is a prolonged kiss, the guitar a docile hiss in search of affection, and the heavenly marriage of shoegaze and Dreampop shifts the earthly axis of our listening path...

7 gone

Dense, gloomy, capable of instilling fear as well, the song represents the most disturbing but resounding moment of this first album. After an introduction that should be in the manuals of the perfect way to start a song, a stop-and-go surprises us and then comes a circular dance full of petals given by a sensual guitar, with the voice sounding like a timbre of questions hanging in the sky...

8 sundowning

A concert of theirs should open and close with this epidermal blaze, an instrumental sparkle that closes the mouth and the lungs, a sonic apnoea that shows the greatness of their sensory exploration. A thermometer, a clock hand, a barometer of mood, a sketch on a sheet of paper made by adult hands, a story, a plot that sequesters and throws thought into the matryoshka of their art, which here finds heaven's blessing. Post-Rock seeks companionship, it finds it in the shoegaze impetus and the fertile Post-Punk wave, in a tangle that knows how to offer joy, but it is undeniable that a resounding state of tension wins out.

If you end an album with perfection, hands can only peel for thunderous applause...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Supino

27th April 2023

https://sunshinescold.bandcamp.com/album/echoes-of-a-former-life