My Review: The Slow Readers Club - The Slow Readers Club

The Slow Readers Club - The Slow Readers Club

The boomerang launched by Tony Wilson, and which had led Manchester to become one of the main centres of music distribution capable of shocking the world, returned to the city, crashing into the disaster of the yellow and black temple of the Hacienda. Oasis arrived a few years later to complete the previous work, but the quality was low and everything died: there are tragedies that do not need deaths...

Everything took only one direction: trying to be credible in the eyes of the Mancunians, the real judges, and the temperature of enthusiasm dropped towards indifference and indifference. Then came the Slow Readers Club and nothing seemed able to give a wake-up call to the totally disarmed musical capital. After experiencing a few successes (within the city walls), under the name Omerta, the band gave up, disbanded, and, as is rightly said in these cases, from the ashes came an ensemble that did not have the courage or perhaps even the ability to completely shake off its brief but intense past. The line-up changed, the bass player and singer-songwriter remained and, in a merry-go-round of searching for identity, they produced the album on their own, because no one really believed in the possibilities of this icy and fiery line-up. Songs that showed Manchester from above, under the microscope of a crisis that was surely becoming impossible to deny. Melancholy, dedication to the search for the miracles that faith and enthusiasm can produce, are some of the oxygen-deprived gills that emerge from these wet-skinned sonic arrows. What crashes down on Manchester is a meteorite that does not shatter, crumbles into indifference and falls into the crater where all the ambitions of dozens of bands that attempted success in that period rest. This record, unquestionably, is guilty: it is not truth that is sought, but a high degree of extraneousness that does not intoxicate the advancing void. Compositions that, like trees without colours (not visible), bend towards the pain that welcomes them with open arms, tearing...

And yet.

We are in front of an expanse that contemplates genius, experimentation, risks piled up and an aptitude for generating astonishment from the grey mantle. A debut that sacrifices dreams. As a harvest, like sowing without scattering, we find the musical synthesis of Aaron, the composer of most of these tracks, capable of stretching out his hand towards the centre of Europe, yet writing lyrics that surround the city: treaties of dangers, generous reminders, the muted flames that overhang everyday life, bewilderment, the economic crisis, the darkness of every nature. They are only a part of the themes he deals with, but what is important is the functionality of a musical writing capable of highlighting their features, their importance. Darts, bullets, invitations, an almost embarrassing sequence of boundless tension, with a voltage that falls in his voice.

Never has one been heard that knows how to be like his: a plough with blunt blades able to separate, gently, the anxieties of living with its disasters, and the desire to affirm the legitimacy of the heart. It should be pointed out that the decision to give electronics the most visible side apparently takes away space from the guitar which, we will see later, will return to dominance on the album BUILD A TOWER. But this is precisely where the trick is: to make the listener take a path of scouting, to devise a plan to catch overdubs, balanced arrangements, often unsettling in their intensity.

The mood is not leaden, decadent, turned towards a permissible discouragement, given the situation of the period of a town that from being fundamental had become one of many, with its head lowered to contemplate the glorious past.  The choice of electrodark as the permanent site of sensually electric oscillations establishes a uniqueness that, by attaching an indierock character, will give the whole thing a clear appearance of effervescent amazement. The love for The Smiths and David Bowie is not yet apparent, but the seeds of a ray of time that was to take time can already be felt.

Constructed like flashes of lightning with a wintry voice, the songs land in the heart like jumps of pirates never lost, never wavering. Sounds that, despite a production that leaves them unsatisfied, have the power to separate history, to create sparks of the future with dreamy breath. A cloak of limpid frenzy establishes contact with their youthfulness, never lacking in imperiously ingenious outbursts. This work is a free descent within concentric thoughts, structured to know the most violent of intimate sifts. The love for the organisational and structural plan is evident in the clamorous dimensions of an imagination that, frothing at the mouth, enters the jacks, in the resoundingly rock drumming, in the bass that never aligns with the Post-Punk past of the Mancunian nucleus. The keyboards are hisses, wheezes, stings that put security on a diet by conveying spasms of controlled fears...There is no doubt about the pop side that is held by the collar of the jacket, and yet shows its full value, in the impetus of the singles that sweep away tension, in the attempt to bless the need for a joyful side that does not clash with that eye-rolling. A combination, a mixture, that becomes a perfectly articulated skill. 

Fearless, sweaty, tenebrous, sunny, they play in the matryoshka of pain with confidence, giving at the end of the listening a generous push towards the future.

If Manchester has returned to a smile today, it owes it largely to this band, the purple-lipped diamond, the pleasure machine of a working day that doesn't wait until Sunday to weep with joy...

Song by Song 

1 One Chance

A track that was part of the Omerta period, here it finds absolute composure: an arpeggio and a voice and the melancholy that sticks to the lyrics (a golden map of a pessimism that you want to suspend...), lead to the tearful falsetto movement of the refrain, to give this semi-ballad the role of making us enter into the creaks of the human being...

2 One More Minute

This one, too, already with its years on its shoulders, finds in the guitar of Kurtis (Aaron's brother, who took over from the resigning previous guitarist) the way to breathe in the epic of the eighties, in the swaggering and dishevelled game of pleasant changes of rhythm and scenery. A rock funnel with melancholic shutters...

3 Frozen

Omerta's first single changes its skin in this album: it will be due to the decision to paint it with an arrangement full of strings (the Italian Lorenzo Castellari does a remarkable job), or to give the musical skin a shot towards the Mediterranean, fact is that, especially in the refrain, the tension becomes the training ground for our spoiled thoughts. Manchester has found a way to throw away its mirror…

4 Block Out The Sun

God chose the pupils, summoned them, gave them the keys to awareness, and broke the sky, making them enter the garage of a wrinkled, thorny, consciously grandiose melody to produce an emotional momentum that makes the listener a traveller without a compass

With the voice freezing every emotional conduit, the semi-acoustic and electric parts meet in a crescendo that, like a despotic seesaw, makes us see darkness from both near and far. When being sad and worried becomes a merit...

5 All Hope, All Faith

Kurtis' brush draws maritime trajectories until they flow into a robust rock afflatus, only to feed again on absurd melancholy. Aaron reveals all his commitment in a descriptive act that frightens, disconcerts and makes convictions sweat. Pragmatism and faith in a God argue, search for an agreement, as the song runs from Salford to Piccadilly, picking up the stage example of Post-Punk soaked glam rock. The electronic part here disappears and everything becomes more immediate…

6 Sirens

When a train loses control, its volume and weight seem to go crazy, heading towards the asphalt with great force. Killing. Sirens kills Manchester, leaving it crumbling, shattered. This guitar comes from Kurtis' passion for the United States, for Glam Rock, but Aaron's keyboard is a child of the Can: short, distorted, magmatic and magnetic, to support the song towards a crash where the melody picks up the detritus of rock, and give the song the feeling of being able to open the eyes of our conscience wide against a society that loves war... Sirens is a rhythmic mantra that paints the poetry of a tremendous truth...

7 Feet On Fire

Angry, nervous but with melodic diplomacy, this composition gives us all the difficult pleasure of an uppercut delivered against our bellies: like a march leading the condemned to execution, so the words, the keyboard, the robotic drums and the greasy bass, are surgically compacted to fix it all in our minds...

8 Follow Me Down

You go down, you plunge into the guitar with the clear feathers given by The Edge, to know the weight of life, everything gets complicated, and you find yourself with a voice that, like a drip full of morphine, tries to give relief. But the opposite happens: in a celestially stupendous way, it makes the situation dramatic and the falsetto becomes an atheistic prayer...

9 Lost Boys

Preceded by the intro where Aaron sings, the track sees Kurtis show off his powerful vocal chords, while the guitar is a buzzing, never annoying, heart-pounding, delivering the city of Manchester in its debauchery. Empathetic, bombastic, it gives the melody the role of making us swallow our sense of loss. Few chords but a lot of sonic poetry: the song is a mournful feast that firms the conviction that existence is a turbulent affair. And rock is kissed by timid electronics: perfection flies subtly in the centre of our heart...

10 Learn To Love The System

The planet Mars descends into the Readers' transistors, kisses the rocking rhythm, distributes a pandemic melody, making us sick with this delirium: a march, never martial but full of bullets of various consciousnesses, takes us into the territories of a profound invective, full of masks and metaphors. The music does the same: it is a riot of solutions that, enriched by a minimalist arrangement, establish a tension that finds in the drum rolls the capacity to drag us into a decomposed dance...

11 She Wears A Frown

The least convincing episode, with a touch of exaggerated propensity towards musical territories distant from their DNA, does not undermine the conviction that one is listening to a misunderstood gem. Everything here is inside a cylinder that hides the colours. The song is less immediate than the others. Only time will perhaps make us ashamed of what seems to be a negative judgement. But one can feel the sensation of a forcing hand, pushing the legs towards a previously untrodden path...

12 Stop Wasting My Time

What you don't expect arrives at the end: an acoustic ballad that elicits comparisons with the Bowie of 1974, only to get rid of this dangerous attitude and find a way to manifest a modernity that seemed impossible after the first few seconds. Mature, heavy words, which sound more like an apology than a criticism, are put into the heart of a voice that knows how to bless the enchantment of torment, to erudite it and bring it into awareness. The strings return, and tears, warm and silent, descend from these chords, from the words, to manifest the capacity for a hypnosis that becomes increasingly melancholic and necessary...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

30th July 2023

https://open.spotify.com/album/1h96U4Q5wLr400o0RsCgg5?si=wwEcguH7T_m_le0989JY3A