My Review: Drama Emperor - Eden’s Gardens

Drama Emperor - Eden’s Gardens

How tasty is the deception that lives segregated in history, that which slips into every mental recess, without release. There are, in art and beyond, examples that certify this malice, this unacceptable filthiness: it should be prevented that beauty has no throne visible from any latitude.

Le Marche, musically the land that has brought to light such limpid champions as Paul Chain and his Death SS, the Gang, Soviet Soviet and many others, in its fertile and golden womb has thrust into the furious musical panorama also this band, whose new release Old Scribe celebrates: a sound beam illuminated by assorted genius to generate emotions at high altitudes. Not simple, not usable with agility, to encourage, on the part of the listener, a profound work of assembly, as the duo composed of Michele Caserta and Cristiano Ballerini has been continually probing, ever since their 2009 debut, every resistance that is contrary to the programming of a precise commitment to be able to decipher the multi-magnetic waves of which they seem to be the generators blessed by the musical divinity.

They are electric vagabonds, in which the melody is a skeleton devoid of skin but functional to the motricity that makes the listening bodies magnets in mystical attraction towards a place that seems to become, episode after episode, a radioactive glade, managing to burn away the superfluous. We have had indications of this in recent years, despite the fact that the production has never been prolific: perfect, because the Marche's ambitions do not have to enter an assembly line. They sow songs like grains of sand in space: where, apparently, there seems to be a lack of meaning, everything is overturned by an effervescent, dynamic, engaging quality.

There are two new compositions that open the E.P., a pair of assaults with different modes, in style, in speed, but both imbued with wonderful metaphysical approaches. The core is a decidedly intense exploration of the provenance of their 'ancient' sonic reprisals. If one apparently denotes the abandonment of a Post-Punk matrix, in favour of insertions of electronic origin, one must however come to terms with the theatricality, a new element that seems to be a definitive stroke of genius.

In addition, one notes an orchestration that, starting from classical music, moves towards the German experimentation of the second half of the sixties: not just songs with a mantle, but notes that enter the bones. Generous sprinklings of the less orthodox eighties are especially evident in the final two pieces, with the dangerous but in this case successful system of two remixes.

The work on offer is an anvil that divides softness from chill: it is undeniable that the cables moving between the compositions are filled with a powerful capacity for investigation, to generate a fast natural selection. The powerful propensity, whether intentional or a splendid accident matters little, to absorb musical genres, to stun them, to make them objective and not dutifully recognisable, stands out. Everything lives for a few seconds with certain movements, only to be followed by others that seem to conceal the very recent past and vanish into the void. As in a stall tipped over in the mud, this is how the songs come to our listening: by putting a masterful uneasy ease, in the emotional register of an oxymoron that paralyses, conquering.

Time is now reserved for the proximity of these electrodes full of purple rust, to assign each moment our role...

Song by Song

1 - Eden's Gardens

A temporal carousel in search of a place to sow images and introspections, verifying the history of every deception: this is the temple of the greatest human lie, a garden that contemplates only pleasure, leaving the past behind. The guitar is fierce, heartbreaking, as it opposes, while the vocal part is a melancholic weeping, in which the perfect English singing places the accents on the vowels in an enchanting way. The drumming cooks the flanks and the six-string solo is a garden-variety sacrifice. The striking classical orchestration of the finale seems to paint a farewell to all illusions. Death in June, Echo & The Bunnymen, and the sound tails of Kitchens of Distinctions are placed in the first part and the enthralling refrain, in full admiration. But it is the change after the second verse that makes the whole thing elusive, sacred, definitively perfect...

2 - Pulse

No doubt: on the podium of the most interesting and atrocious songs of this dazzling 2023! Pulse is the expressive talent, the sonic investigation that starts with a killer loop, surrounded by an industrial shimmer, and then opens up as the song enters, which is a real exercise in study, resulting in a degree. The expressive theme is a cacophonic loop with a recitative that enervates, saps strength and enchants, due to its melodic leanness, inducing thought to travel in the confines of a pulsating mental labyrinth. This is the profound richness of the two artists: the smugness of complacency in writing music to pleasing effect, to project, instead, into the slow chaos of psychedelic textures and thrusts, seen through a tarnished glass, making them sound like a subtle explosion of a magma that ransacks resistance. Sublime!

3 - The Ghost In You

A Darkwave petal that frequents the hot spots of the sluttier and more sensual Coldwave, flies in this hiss that brings to mind great realities of the 1980s: Neon and Gaznevada, two excellences that loved to create to exorcise the fear of experimentation within those musical genres. Certainly dark, introverted, attractive, it makes their affinities and needs visible.

But, and I know that an extraordinary controversy will open up here, it fails to hold the gaze of the first two, because it is more mannered, less able to show the visual genius and quotas. Nothing, let's be clear, that would make the Old Scribe wish not to listen: he would have paid out of his own pocket in 1985 to hear such a composition!

4 - Awake (Soft Rior RMX)

Take Yello out to dinner, take them to the porn cinema of Frankie Goes To Hollywood, and you will see how this remix is a celestial miracle: everything opens up, with continuous electronic inserts making this sonic exercise a hybrid in the direction of madness that becomes a perfect dance hall. Lively, the vocals draw dreams, while the vitaminic Synth discharges are miracles that make strobe lights blush.

5 - The Final Song (Guido Möbius RMX)

A slight ache frequents the mental space: an incipit that wanders in the dryness of a word that bangs on a shrill but extraordinary system, with a special counter-song that recalls Blixa Bargeld in a catatonic state. A sprinkling of dub and proto-house enters the song's circuit: one is constantly in neurotic anticipation...

A demonstration of how time can be put on the table in a laboratory, to design a fluid that makes eternity superfluous: the duo from the Marche has generated the astonishment that travels in the enchanted paradises of perdition, where passions and dreams are splendid corpses to be preserved.

 Italian E.P. of the year for Musicshockworld!

P.S.

Also of note is the splendid artwork by artist Francesco Pirro.

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld 

Salford

17th October 2023

https://dramaemperor.bandcamp.com/album/edens-gardens