My Review: White Rose Transmission - White Rose Transmission

White Rose Transmission - White Rose Transmission

I dedicate this review to the ever precious soul of Adrian, to the generous talent and great humanity of Carlo, and to two friends of mine, Marco Sabatini and Henry Verger.

A sempervirens wanders far from its home on the north coast of a hot and sleepy California, making a stop in the heart of Europe, wandering until it embraces two dishevelled and hard-working souls. Concrete atoms of a miserable attitude allow for a greater appreciation of what has already been created: the new here does not advance, if we refer to musical genres, and that is ultimately a good thing. There is a need for historicised formulas that welcome and coexist with the newness of the literary fabric. On the album, there are never any eristic words, the language used is simple but complex only because of the abundant emotional scouring that is felt. Carlo and Adrian are nocturnal archers, with words that come out of the trees and fall on hearts, subdued and mute, like a flash of lightning that needs no sound to bewitch. A lucullian work, difficult to manage, as it touches leaden thoughts without using the electricity of a musical formula that would anaesthetise the intimate nature, to deliver the certainty that the couple has oiled the talent machine since the dawn of time.

Nothing in this bundle of songs can obscure our amazement: there are guts that will weep before these gems that know no smudge with the years. They were born to give life a 'thou', in a coexistence that only exhausts the stupid, nourishing instead the curious and attentive souls.

Mixtures and temples, containers of absolutes with a long scar, pulsate and stretch, like magmatic star falls, to convince us that there are unquestionable jewels that desire the listening and contribution of our reflections. The whole, what you don't expect from someone who had failed to get the deserved popular tribute with his The Sound, seems a pure strategic essence: Adrian here is a noble comprimario of his best friend's writing, capable and certainly willing of a past to be suspended if not forgotten. Because there are so many novelties compared to the London combo, for a construct that aims to inhabit other zones of the human soul, with a minority measure of lament and a superior measure of lyrics that capture without offering figures of unbearable pain.

Carlo's pen is equally loose, full of romanticism and melancholy, perfectly salubrious and intent on supporting that of the unfortunate Jeopardy band leader. Hamletic lanes, sensory highways, crossroads of light in the night without hands glue themselves to the simple musical composition, intent on cooling the boils of Post-Punk, to approach Neo-Folk, Baroque and Classical, to mask the disappointment of careers that until then had not known mass consensus. Progress is born from the consummation of common experiences, a circle within Adrian's ordeal, a turbulent soul who, with Carlo, finds the calm and an examination of his moody zig-zag to channel it into the benefit, a place unknown to him until then. Here, the noblest and most powerful sentiment structures the blond Londoner's sweet but bitter smile towards the conquest of a different joy, perhaps one he had never imagined. The elements to write together descended from their drinking, laughter, from gestures like nests of unpredictable enchantments.

A cosmic drama is perennially disobedient and getting it into the creative circuits is an enterprise that needs a strong dose of hypnosis: it can all be grasped in these vibrant perspective planes, articulated to exalt the greyish colours of the human condition. Epic, melancholic dances, ballads with a cork to make one feel the thrill of emotion, are stamped on the listener, in a crash where banality dies and the crystalline class of the two survives. The vitriol briefly enters into well-educated electric guitars, to hollow out a decadent funnel that is impeccable and intentional. A partnership that before becoming art is the prerequisite of their climax, of their dreams that here experience the possibility of recording reality to adorn it, for a deception that is more necessary than ever. The few drums are precious leaps into the belly of a half-hidden tribality, while the keyboards, piano and bass are a trained team, glued to tenderness less prone to explosion, but rather serving as fuel for those guitar chords that alone fill the sky with a constant rainbow.

The two voices, never equipped for the display of timbres, are the servants of the beauty that presents itself compactly throughout the thirteen compositions. They are breaths that do not seek glory, at times so similar as to be unrecognisable, in an embrace that stuns, by uniqueness, making the skin livid.

Unbearable is the thought that the completion of this kind of path is capable of giving continuous bursts to the creators: you would think the opposite, but instead...

1995 is a dishonest year, draining, misleading, banal, where few albums hold a candle to the past and where visiting certainty is a wave of approximation bordering on bafflement. If, on the other hand, one listens to this work, one notices the continuous calibre of attention, the steady pulse that prevents useless and mannerist overdubs, a propensity for minimalism that gives the song form a different and certainly nobler meaning: one is particularly attentive to the desire to crystallise the harmonic line, the skilful use of arrangements that look the primordial structure in the face to give an intensity that floats at ease, in every single track.

Adrian's shyness is a sceptre that falls under the skin, without stinging or hurting, giving a castle ablaze with icy flames. And Carlo can only be the fireman who structures the future by saving its complex soul. This is how the acoustic and electric parts are citizens of a concentric core that does not let in the ostracism and guilt of Post-Punk used by Borland to attend to his inner travail.

A vesperal, misanthropic style underlines the enormity of the possessions located in the basin of their talent, machine gun with flowery bullets, white roses, indeed...

A continuous walk on the oneiric plane, to gag an opposing reality, makes the slow-moving sound gems absolute hinges, lampposts and showers of a dramatic listening but able to be benevolent, almost mystical, surely able to engulf billions of boisterous and bilious schizos.

White Rose Transmission is an encounter that closes the windows to superficial listening, renders pure the fear and desire for real, concrete beauty, with tears that never leave...

The present poetics, far from being just a poignant ride, is one of the entrances that facilitate the desire for non-stop listening, to fall joyfully into the sadness that strolls with its hands in its pockets, satisfied.

It is time to go make love to these thirteen virgins, these water-filled particles that will bathe us in a oneness that knows no disobedience...

Song by Song

1 Unkissable 

A twinkling of dark sounds injecting vocals into the play of wicked guitars, with the drum breaks coming to barricade it all in the wool and dust covered skins. An opening track that separates the past and presents the coda of Talking Heads soaked in almost muted psychedelia. Great work on a Byrdsian-flavoured guitar, floating and synthesising the nature of a composition that strolls through the last three decades.

2 Die dunkle Macht

Astonishment, genuflection, the changed ardour that bows before the rust-filled sonic martyrdom at the beginning, then moves with familiarity into the border of the leave-taking of the senses. Majestic, epic, with the East appearing with an arrangement that projects the track south of fear. The stop-and-go offers a funky guitar imprint before retreating and leaving the simple chords free to become a sting in the ice...

3 In Your Hand

The colour of softness rises on the keys of a piano trained to catch the rain and bounce in the heart. Disconcerting in beauty and depth, the voices in unison caress desire and drive emotion with the certainty that it only takes a few notes to undergo paralysis. The intoxication is provided by semi-electric inlays and strings to hold your breath, until Adrian's guitar decides to weep over the melancholic melody...

4 Sister Sweetness

The baroque music set-up establishes the first amazement, untiring through the juxtaposition of a brushstroke that allows the singing a delightful chain, capable of whipping any opposition. While everyone was looking for refrains to attract the stupid, Carlo and Adrian painted sweetness in the belly of a minimalist installation. Not noise, let alone deflagration, but delicious electric caresses...

5 Vapour

The Irish tradition seems to move to surrender some of its burdens in this shifting, mutant ballad, a delightful strip of hypnotic condensations that seem to come from a sunny Sunday in the Dublin sky. Then the drama takes over, to freeze the first part and cede the stage to a scratchy but sensual guitar...

6 Street of Flowers

The Gods are bored, looking for entertainment, babbling, but they can't be distracted: here comes a song totally eager to remind us of Ian McCullogh and his Echo & The Bunnymen's singing of Porcupine. But in this song there is a drama that bounces back, debasing the comparison and bringing the two composers to face those gods who know full well how this jewel is incapable of dying...

One can only suspend perdition on a road filled with sonorous, intense and heart-stopping flowers...

7 Allein

The ears squeal, the guitars are needles and the bass an unknown banner of hypnotic propulsion, and the body is freed in a dance that circumnavigates the cantato, a true emblem of a penchant for teasing smiles, although the lyrics drive the thought into a small grimace. A subtle electronic circuit pushes the guitar to be industrious with a few notes, managing to establish contact between the poetry of the belly and the desire to enjoy. David Bowie would have loved this exercise in enchantment, no doubt about it. The first track where musical residency cannot be established, but rather the decision is made to lean towards the need to sing. The two voices in the finale are gentle brushes to light up the sky...

8 Thorn of a Rose

Borland's synthesis knows and meets the amniotic fluid of Carlo's writing. The cataracts of the sky mist up in Adrian's breaths, the guitars arouse memories, the Psychedelic Furs India clap, while we have the feeling that in this track lives all the magic of an intuition: in the nocturnal solitude the thorns are the kiss of a pain in search of space. Short, dying of astonishment, it needs no frills because every lonely rock has won the applause of heaven...

9 Silver Age

Violins and travelling motions open the listening and then it's Neo-Folk, tamed by the semi-acoustic guitar in the odour of Nada, but the singing is a dry lash, brief, to concede more seconds to the music that is a cavern that reminds us how the Sound, in slowed-down systems, were inimitable. Here, perhaps, it is even better.

In as much as the tension-filled part leaves no room for concession: Silver Age is a tense, exhausting, endless arc...

10 Indian Summer

The Doors, Velvet Underground: both American bands facing and interested in this hypnotic cradle, where crooning rises up and becomes a flight with spiritual features, until everything seems a carousel of fearless styles...

11 The Hell of It

Sounds like dumps, notes like uncontrolled marasmus, in a vertical, hypnotic, psychedelic jubilation, where a story exercises abandon and guitars only need a few seconds to be a seizure. Full of clouds, gloomy, devastating, short, slow, it then launches into an emotional sweep that gives us the keys to cross a bridge: that of the early seventies, the American shore

12 The Sea Never Dies

The real miracle arrives almost at the end of the album: if we had the desire, the impression that everything was beautiful, useful, important, here we find ourselves inside the summa of an unrepeatable union of tragedies mastered by the talent of the two that here really exaggerates because of a caress that hurts more than a series of kicks, because the song has the ability to drag us further and further into a kneeling full of fear and devotion. Poignant, upright, an obvious gift in reminding us how many songs have failed when attempting to address the subject of lyrics. And then the music: a ballad that seems to come out of thunder, breathless but unwavering...

13 Kugel der Einsamkeit

Roses have withered, lost their colour, their exhausted sinews have granted death, and to do so they invent a harrowing magnet to conclude a simply perfect, painful and stinging album. The piano is a gloomy fist, a theatrical performance that plays with pauses, with the entry of sounds that screech over the heart and dry out the baritone voice that is swallowed up by the apocalyptic sphere, by the distant wind that can be heard coming as if everything were a farewell. It is fear that injects the black keys of the piano with the need to make us weep, while thanking the true friendship of two boiling souls for giving birth to this jewel with infinite carats...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

14th September 2023

https://open.spotify.com/album/3pRW2k3FzpSLdQCRMxO7fb?si=DMzkiBTiSoa7bJ_Y6OpxnA