My Review: Polina Suffer - Agonia Market

Polina Suffer - Agony Market

A row of electronic nails make the decision to go under the wounded rainbow of a great whirlwind: they are only two, but amply endowed with remarkable ballistic abilities, they can aim and hit the target, shaking the innate glow of every daily tragedy. A pair of young souls who dress the surface of dreams to disintegrate them with an imaginative maturity that exudes distant, perhaps even prenatal experiences, to rummage through the refuse of decaying impetuses. They debut to set fantasies on fire, amid fields of mental arthritis, subterfuge, masks, hypotheses and exhausting electronic machine guns with darkwave aftertaste. Words like voices rummaging through the dustbin of behavior, with a gothic feel among cobalt threads and vibrations that seem to come from the German experiments of the 1960s. A series of crossroads, of abrupt stops, amidst darkness that does not fail to erupt in fat mischievous laughter, while Beatrice, the girl with the long nails in her often atonal and then ringing uvula, registers the mental balance that Thomas, the mad sorcerer who sweeps away the detritus of boredom to channel it toward the ravine of no return, flexes to make us approach an ever-rising emotional state, in the disaster hanging beneath pregnant black clouds. The Old Scribe, the moment he discovers the sudden sweetness of which the two are capable, trembles and is frightened: the pair (Milan and Turin the cities that give the boys only the starting point) uses known techniques and then destroys them with pounds of faded, changeable, undigestible sugar and for that reason succulent and precious.

An album that does not sound like a debut given the remarkable sensory locomotive that runs on tracks resting on the ground as if the whole thing were one long time-travel. You marvel, you crash toward these melodies that fatten mournful thoughts, for it is the lyrics that ripen the greatest astonishment, almost unbearable, given an enormous need to visit topics that seem to have been soaked in literature, in history, in a lively and violent propensity for the fleshing out of all doubt. They don't joke, they don't play a game, but they play out their breaths as if they were a generous gift from maddened minds in tepid decay.

The heart cries, listening becomes an electrode, a welding between evil and the stubborn enemy, that good which in these musical tracks crashes. 

Conspicuous accelerations of rhythms, clusters of water vapor fogging the view as listening becomes an indecent, sublime, filthy affair, with reminders of musical genres that sound like hay in a hypothetical evening meal inside a barn full of skeletons. There is no shortage of the hardships of those living the young age in an old, decaying world, with food becoming less and less nutritious, with books and movies as anchors of salvation. But that is not enough, surely their souls are a spite to those who overtake life without cognition. They, on the other hand, plant their feet under the dust, under the earth, inside the mystery of pains connected to lukewarm nightmares...

It astonishes and astounds that after only two singles, and the project having been born for a short time, one can cross the border of a sick thought: will the whole thing be a lie? Will it really only be two and so young? The Old Scribe does not judge, he rests his tears on their skull rolling song after song on the tray made of transistors, guitars, lightning and corroding lava, to take us into the freshness of their walking pain. This explains the crazy accelerations, the Darkwave atoms flirting with Coldwave, in a temporal limbo of great fascinations, in order to stuff their needs with a poetry that seems to be screamed by Edgar Allan Poe.

Lend your ear to their amniotic curves, in the womb of a burden, in the poetry of a mental brothel, where only the mind, prostituting itself, releases useless toxins.

To begin an inevitable career in this way is to make many enemies, which is good and right, for there will be so many jealousies that will crop up in their circuit: do not halt your prodigy, for Polina Suffer is a new urgency, which will be the realm of many disordered souls...

Now is the time to enter, with fear and respect, within these songs, to die well with them....

Song by Song

1 Intro

A psychedelic lullaby, like a music box of daily suspicion, opens the non-dances: in these notes disturbed by calls of Virgin Prunes on military parade, one can recoil under nice thick blankets. No rhythm, just a devilishly hidden fairy inside water notes that seem to boil restless souls...

2 Dead Womb

Over drumming that brings to mind Wall of Woodoo experimentations and Sheffield-area post-punk guitars, the two souls sing uniting and leaving to Beatrice's voice the role of the sick bearer of the highest register, handing over to Tommaso's non-baritonal and deep role of being closer to the earthly crater. Guitars rolled in salt and red wine, celebrating a bloody womb, an existence that has yet to face this murky world...

3 Burnt

The beginning is a nocturnal sepulcher, waiting to let out an emotional hammer that dances to a distinctly American electro punk, with dramatic inlays closer to the D.A.F. of the latter part of their career. Stop-and-go games create continuous crackles in the legs that seem to fly, while Beatrice's voice whispers fears and tensions. The electronics here are a well-packaged cloak and mask: vocal echoes lean against derivative loops that like quiet screams stick to the listening. And it is definitely the first moment of total loss of control....

4 Aesthetic Drama

Look: you wanted surprises, magnitudes inside minimal wave suspensions? The platter is full of oscillations, evocations, when Belgium still had to give birth to Coldwave. Beatrice and Tommaso become actors, with a vocal that invokes the support of immediate but not too visible crooning to create a clip in the hair of thoughts. The whole is a gentle plug, with the drum machine slowly accompanying a synth in a state of grace...

5 Polina, Suffer!

The first of the two singles, in the context of the album, seems to have become a brick in the abdomen in the meantime: a wail that darkens dreams, with Beatrice's witch-like voice on acid that makes us skeletal, frightened souls destined for oblivion. The musical basis is a clear hypnotic imprint, a lesson perfectly learned (perhaps unwittingly) by the mammoth The Legendary Pink Dots. What then is special about this song? That the musical identity of the two Italian artists knows the phenomenon of awareness, of surrendering with weapons in hand though, not to say "enough" without having stained at least a little a synth that is a divine whim...

6 Obscura et Foetida

Do you remember Nag, Nag, Nag? Here is the granddaughter, born in Turin, fresh and eager to spurt towards your arms, amid the wails of childbirth. A syringe, an improvised anesthesia, and then a crescendo that becomes light out of the womb. Between English electro-punk (this time) and small particles of German synth-punk, the melody is a labored breath, a prayer approaching in the subtle texture. The two come together for the choral performance of a path that faces the demanding theatricality of Fura Dels Baus, in an obligatory feeling of imprisonment.

7 Plastic Regrets

The other single, a razor-sharp that concedes no defenses, with demonic laughter over a bass line coming out of the boiling basement of two lives connected in a lightning challenge, brings us to one consideration: a few notes are enough to enlarge the state of anguish that her voice can create. 

8 Harsh Flesh

Brian Eno walks through the garden of broken dreams, smoking an unease in search of a melody that is as decadent as possible. The dio spread their wings, cradle and fill the melody with the essential, a paranoia that tinges their fingers with a blackish sweetness. Slow, passionate but inevitably a slab that like a sword of Damocles takes away second after second of breathing space, it shines from the juxtaposition of instruments barking, as if stunned, in tender melodies...

9 We Were Just Lost Kids

A dump of nerves lodges within a dry harmonic line, echoes, bounces, as if Siouxsie and Budgie's Creatures had found a postdated sap, an absurd and Machiavellian need to move the hands of time. The groove seems to come out of glasses slipped into the jungle of the boniest Coldwave, to limit the spaces of escape. Perhaps the darkest track on this work, intriguing because it is elusive, quick to leave within us the certainty of a necessary chant. Like an electronic delirium deprived of electricity....

10 Desires

Death barks, thunders, spreads its wings, and Thomas becomes an engineer ordering music to be spastic, oblique, uncontrollable, with fascinations that seem to come out of any St. Petersburg music workshop. There it is, alive, the melody that needs a rust-filled synth to give us the dance amidst wishes with a chain around its neck. The stakes give the direction of disaster: you are in the early 1980s, in the wartime part of the delusions, where dreams and desires were whims and Post-Punk threw in the towel to become a parody of itself. But Polina Suffer resurrect, with their perverse beats, the need to end up in the abyss...

11 Whysteria

One definitely enters the clearest zone of this album: that of detonation, of the hysteria that spanks all joy and drowns it out, in the deadly vices that are strung together, like the musical genres here, in the circus that, starting from the Can's experimentation, changes the face, accelerates the rhythm and becomes a dance daughter of the Black Forest.

For the first time the bass comes out of Killing Joke's warbles, but the musical pattern is a continuous vocal, unchained in the fingers of the two young artists who improvise a scream that is a symbol coming from polite madness: the zenith is here in your ears...

12 The Blue Cathedral 

Darkness emerges from a slow cobweb, hypnotic and persuasive, like a stunned siren waiting to be decapitated. They surface, in the blackest jewel of Agonia Market, the pieces of listening that seduced the two in order to be included in the diabolical sound plan, with Virgin Prunes having sex with Danielle Dax, in a hypothetical Dantesque circle of deranged and deranged artists. The bells invoke the procession, sick, of a scene from a hypothetical Kubrick film, in the birthing night of a slowed nightmare. The chanting contrasts the sonic mantra, a slow motion to understand how it was possible to score a goal with pain in the chest. Siouxsie weeps, jealous, as well as any other star descending into retirement, because Beatrice and Tommaso cuddle the spite, draw, with an imperceptible guideline, sweetness and bitterness, to establish the place of consecration of a song that is nothing more than the collection of ashes thrown from the rose garden of the Turin hillside: the final act to dismiss all madness and create the tail in which to extinguish...

13 Outro

The end be damned: we find ourselves in a lightened industrial zone, where vomit comes not from drills but from blunt sheets, a terrifying appearance of a theatre that resides in the cradle of time, between East Germany and Russia, in a slow and irreverent duel filled with tension. There was no better way to end this record: don't go back to the first song, stay here, be good, play again on this vessel full of rusty nails, where every single sound is a labyrinth of minds with an expiration date. Let your joy be sombre, follow the chimes full of black sap out of these lopsided ways and get lost: this album is a wound we can all be proud of...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

26th May 2023

https://polinasuffer.bandcamp.com/album/agonia-market-2?from=search&search_item_id=2360249248&search_item_type=a&search_match_part=%3F&search_page_id=2621474286&search_page_no=1&search_rank=2&search_sig=a9844d7d339377970352100ba32b33c9