My Review: Noktva - Icarus

It’s all there!

Everything that marks on the skin of intelligence the sense of belonging to a sonic miracle to be appropriated as one does with the keys to a house, to be able to enter and enjoy what one desires.

The sky to be perfect has created swallows, to bring freshness and truth to our eyes.

The latter feed on souls to accompany that flight with their own. 

So what happens here?

We are inside a musical affair that, together with the lyrics, gives the impression that the Sicilian band's growth is already a given, we find ourselves undoubtedly immersed in their newfound dizziness, finally happy with their reasoned suffering translated into a simply perfect stage cataclysm.

Having understood the mythology of Icarus, we can better disentangle ourselves from the extrasensory tale of this tangle of images that render sublime cognitions concerning love and time, dreams and everyday limits.

A joy that is not only representation but also exploration, in a movement that stretches the sky and mortifies selfishness.

Icarus is an anti-hero, here elevated to a speaking conscience, a communicator through a cloud-covered din that he passes through unscathed.  NOKTVA take off his parachute and make him aware of a path, at times devoid of gravity's acceleration, presenting him with the bill of his fate. In a latent and clearly sybaritic present, the band instead displays strength and richness, decision and facility for a result that turns us on the side of beauty. For when music succeeds in communicating the superfluous, one lives free, with the sole obsession of a bowed thank you. But in this agglomeration of sounds the five swallows also show the itchy seeds of instincts with reins awaiting command. The flowing growth displaces the need to define the genres present in this musical work: if you like, the current blackness has made them even blacker in soul, influencing Kurten and Miriam's singing towards Deathrock modes, while the growing structure of the track contemplates Post-Punk situations painted with a pliability and willingness to bring Darkwave macrocosms to bear.

But does it all serve a purpose? Would it make us understand it better?

Not at all.  Not an introduction, but the theatrical spectacle of a murderous affair that finds its proper tangle and repository in the notes.

A communicative act traverses the streets of preparatory rites, like this voice that looks up from below, from an intimacy that here is closed up to the harrowing scream that shakes the moon.

Then the bass, light at first and then desecrating, the synth and guitar, which is a flight of bees full of anxiety, rise up and wait for Kurten's postulate, grandson of a deathrock memory with bloody crosses, which allows Miriam to penetrate the text where, from the beginning, the intention to think and address another time, that of the temple of dreams, is clear.

Continuous crossings of blades and drums dishearten the serenity of those who do not care about the events, the mythological flows that still lend themselves to being elements of induction without rhetoric.

They are not instruments but mental patrols that seek to witness the failure of a man not a man, of a flight not a flight, in its precipitation not only into the void but above all into the flow of the millennia. 

Where is his place? His role?  Noktva mortify the ugliness of those who do not care about Icarus and engrave it in their own skin, even before in a song that manages to make the beat murky. 

An international reality without a passport for illusions, just as for the protagonist of this story, an emblem of a purification with no strategy other than to save him.

The growth of Miriam and Kurten's singing work is a diabolical, surprising fuse, a magnificent manifestation of a union with no signs of frustration.

But to be such, the synchrony of souls with oil-soaked wings is the fruit of all five, eating up the same vitaminic propensity to stretch the sky of their dreams, their yearnings and sighs, always striving to cancel any visit to the surface of joy, so little use to these now adult and conscious children.

Traces of a temporal overtaking, compared to other Italian bands, are highlighted by the structure that does not envisage the song form as a stratagem to arrive at the pleasantness of listening, but wants to reach us through a plot, like a tale that develops in the earthquake of the disorder of a life that died before it desired flight.  Because, if you pay attention, Icarus is a dream, therefore a mental place, a private matter and structure. To be brought to light, the Sicilian band visited the sky, up there, beyond the stratosphere, where light is a scream without a window. And so the journey backwards is intuited (that guitar and bass are the magnets that bring order, while the synths are the lead-filled wings that give way, falling into the centre of the abdomen, to give the softness of happiness the nightmare of reality), and then make the leap forward

Everything is tense, perverse, on the run, underlining how music is the writing of the soul, which, in this case, starts as far back as Mythology.

A resounding album had sentenced the (undoubted) qualities of a great work, but here they have gone further: epic, dreamlike, dramatic, sensual, even in the face of a dead man predestined for the deception of human history. The five take care of him, give him a new meaning, give him a harmonic line full of that sadness that consoles and makes us feel at home. They enable us to visit the unknown, to simplify it, to spill tons of melancholy in simple verses but with the specific weight of a free-falling sky.  Icarus doesn't know whether to advance in the wake of the celestial face, and Miriam and Kurten invent an extraordinary stratagem: injecting the verses with smoke and blindness, to make any attempt to escape deadly, to consolidate the emotional labyrinth that permeates every inch of this composition. 

The walls are found to be wax paintings, but a far cry from those of Litfiba: here the invoice is not of geometric ordinance, rather a treatise that enters the musician veins of minutes deliciously filled with a fog that restores the sacrifice of Icarus, put by the group in a position to interrogate our minds. 

Jack's drumming is the seal that nails all music in being a funnel, into which Icarus tries to climb, not wanting to know the immensity of the void behind him. 

Such a piece is not born in a rehearsal room, from a jam, but from the persuasion of a path that needs the hands of time and patience. A seam, after a perfect tacking, gives us the immense construction that is not divided into stages but in growth, exactly like the career of this group to which we surrender our every dream: to see them on the roof of the world flying, fearlessly, together with Icarus, benefiting from our eternal embrace.  Maestro Alessandro Calovolo used to say 'And it is joy'.

I, with fear and modesty, would add:

"With Icarus it is freaky joy that falls from our feathers"....

In conclusion: get into the habit of leaving it in a continuous play, because it is only from total dependence not on a miracle but on hard and serious work that one learns how little it matters to listen to so much nonsense.

Take up residence in Noktva's house and you will have a sensible, fluent, dreamlike sadness in free flight...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

26th September 2023

https://noktva.bandcamp.com/track/icarus