My Review: Born Days - My Little Dark

 

                                                                          Born Days - My Little Dark

Darkness is the favourite companion on the journey of time, from the beginning of every living form, because its essence does not require the effort of light and can more easily absorb any opposing force. When it is the art of music that approaches this context, it is possible to feed on the vehement amazement of the sensory oscillations that do not deny their awe of the subject matter. Let us meet an American artist, Melissa Harris, capable of probing, of mixing lucubrations, of transferring the known onto the fuzzy skin of the unconscious, to activate mental and sound circuits in the union that exports beauty from the hypothesised to the real plane. My Little Dark is a jewel within slow space travels, starting with dreamlike traits and ending with somatic ones, having in its dowry the unquestionable ability to physicalise everything. She focuses the project and arms herself with dilations, experimentations, building frames and paintings perfectly oiled in his prodigious electronic orchestration, the true translator of her needs. One is dismayed, frightened, tenderised, never perplexed, always eager for this sweetness that kisses the darkness, crossing the flow of need that leads to endless metamorphosis. These are not songs, but steel structures free of screeching inside our temples, in which dwells a form of gentleness not foreseen but on which it becomes compulsory to feed. Melissa designs the trajectories of sound to erudite them, she draws from oceans of the unexpected to educate them, shaping and seducing by that continuity of the expressive side that leads the listener to establish an unimpeachable truth: if there is such a thing as a concept album, this is the perfect, precise demonstration of it, gripping body and mind in a grip that leaves no scratches. There is a clear sensation of entering a dream, inside a spaceship, with the silence pushing our thoughts to mute, entrusting our only free space to the task of hearing this voice synthesising billions of hypothetical elementary particle, in the interplay of molecules seeking guidance. Then it is the synthesisers, the beats, the plots like suspenseful blades that determine an upheaval that is eternal. Death seems to be a gallant and interesting date, no less than existence: these tracks remove beams, splinters, and frets, and give peace without ringing, transporting existence above the sky. There is no denying the ability to make music swim in an electric blanket full of sponge, with the tinkles cuddling and cloaking. She navigates this incredible creature through the history of electronics, from the purely playful to the joyful, from the pragmatic to the experimental, and then is determined to expose the result in order to make the consequential paralysis pleasant.

She has certainly nourished herself with studies, with approaches, the masters of the possible she surely knows, but, as an unrepentant pupil, she has surpassed them, with this album that demonstrates how the unknown skein, if discovered, can break down all previously experienced joys. It shocks, for its wise dose of salt in the magnetic waves of her computers, her synths, for the sugar deposited in her singing mode, while, when you least expect it, she has already made you addicted to her intent... Quintals of mysticism, kilometres of contact lenses to focus on the invisible, continuous games between naivety and wisdom, lead her to cross different musical genres without reins or control, ending up making us disjointed but perfectly in tune with her objective, which seems to be to dismember the certainties and boredom that can come from that in which we instead find resource and affinity. She puts psychedelia, Dream-Pop, Coldwave, Darkwave into her refined funnel to perish them, with intelligence and just the right amount of nastiness.
She takes the imaginative passages and stamps them to the real ones, in the distorted dance of a spectacular confusion, always with a rhythm that does not want to reach maximum speed: for this reason, too, her is the courage of a strong and aware soul, because she does not seek success but an educational expression, one that can, perhaps, also be disorienting. Darkness covers every hope, every smile, leaving it to the submerged of the mind to guide the resources that her music generously exposes, ranging and sowing songs like bank robberies without bullets or masks on the face: she plunges into the robbery, delivering a slow, anaesthetising laugh to fear. She writes a miracle for a total of fifty-one minutes: the initial measure of her infinite class...  

Song by Song

1 - Enemy

And it is moody carillon, in the slowness that welcomes atmospheres both sweet and gloomy, in a loop on which the voice flies with its enemy, for a sadness that receives resounding support: applause!

2 - My Little Dark

The flight grows, in height and speed, but always without pain or sweat: everything is calibrated perfectly for a torch that makes the sky the child of this caress that embraces, to make a proposal to death that here lives a challenge under the banner of enchantment.

3 - Bird Song

Melissa's desire for life is as much in the words of the lyrics as in the music: starting with the chirping of a nature that still wants to be present, we arrive at a keyboard that sketches the sky, with vocal chords that are filled with electric tension, while the melody is so human that it moves us... 4 - Over Again

"Burn myself over again": a thunderstorm of intentions finds a home in the spectral Over Again, a secular litany that invites one to dance but with all senses alert. A skilful darkwave blend in appearance but not in the specific musical genre, it drifts into the basin of an essential dreamwave with electrowave brushstrokes to define an immense, suspended and liturgical track

5 - Dreams

A walk in the park reveals particles of important thoughts: an electric cable of great tension is constructed, in a spectacular sieve of versatile notes prone to move in the contours of a trip-hop that courts neo-psychedelia.

6 - How To Disappear

It rains clouds in your heart, with the impression that Melissa knows how to use some of the wisdom of classical music and then dismember it to leave us with a sound carpet that is almost simple, but in reality reveals an immense ability to give balance between the various phases of the song. 7 - Ganymede

Perhaps the album's most solemn moment, the summary of its will and manifest ability to be a subtle needle that penetrates the senses. After the initial dreamy part comes the electronic evolution that offers a perfectly controlled drama.

8 - Deep Empty (DMT Feelings)

Perhaps depression invades the lane of this album: it does so with words and music that are justifiably grievous, that seem to be the daughters of ancient sadnesses brushed over and experienced by the Cure and the Sound, albeit with different musical attitudes. But here there is a pleasant lack of breath...

 9 - Destroyer

The theatre of horror throws itself into a lyric that messes up the clothes of thoughts. Energetic loop successions and synth reciting heavy progressions make the track an effervescent bow in which fear grins happily. Clamorous!

10 - Conscious Conscience

Certain thoughts have voices that reveal truths that seem far away: to conclude the album, the Chicago artist spends minutes as if a psychologist's couch were welcoming her deepest intimacy. One is as if enveloped in a slow, obsessive slap, with the palms of the hands slowly crushing our necks. While the voice seems to free itself of everything and ascend into the arms of the clouds...

A resounding work that the Old Scribe describes as the second best album of this 2023...

Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
19th November 2023

https://borndays.bandcamp.com/album/my-little-dark