My Review: Sacred Legion - The Silent Lineage

Sacred Legion - The Silent Lineage

"I was a child, that is, one of those monsters that adults fabricate with their regrets"

Jean-Paul Sartre

A corsair race, the funny ways of a past that flirts with wounds catapults itself into the neurasthenic tangle of lipstick music, perfectly fixed to the mystery that accounts for itself, in the deafening impermeability that fractures expectations and pretensions.

From the province of Frosinone, three adult figures work at the lathe, encircling the flanks of the clichés that would always like to be certain that every definition cannot be incorrect. And so the poor fantasy in power speaks of 'Death-Rock, Dark-Wave, Post-Punk', as the impetus of a vulgar approach.   But the band from Ciociaria does not have in its repertoire the need to travel with an identity defined by others: the terrain of manoeuvre is absolutely marked by a freedom that is obligatorily limited because it is necessary to describe human drifts, where consolation and culture, of literary derivation, favour more precise boundaries. The sacred temporal space governs the liturgical spasms of compositions that make every vicious circle surrender. They are far removed from those reference groups with which Fabiano, Mirko and Tony's band are associated. The album is a hundred-metre runner's sprint (given the brevity of its twenty-four minutes), but it lives with the propensity of the marathon runner, since listening, the carefully repeated one, shows the crossing of history, with geography constructing physical features, to the point of giving faces a light that reveals complexity. All eight songs foreshadow a future to be marked in their intellectual paths.  The three aim their refined stylistic abundance to encircle reality, curbing the stylistic hangover of different musical genres. It is orgasmic anticipation, it is the precipice of a refined abrasive combo, with guitars battering the vessel of impulses born in research. Fabiano articulates thoughts with luculent impetus, scraping away banality.

The sounds curate the overkill, unravelling in the school of a mode that favours a strange form of 'catchiness': some refrains seem to favour the expression of 'gothic pop in search of imprecise smears', a mode that can bring even those less accustomed to these climatic and sensory inclinations closer to these lyrics that probe and bring to light a ravenous need to freeze truths.

Five words are repeated twice, generating a planimetry of mental addresses.

Heart - Eyes - Life - Back - Dream.

Here they are, these mammoth queens, piloting a precise order of intentions in the chaos of a slight cut-up.

The music does not perform panegyrics, it could not: it reveals, represents, seduces, hammers, scratches, connects the mood and smells of that writing with which it dialogues, fights, establishes blood pacts. Tony's querulous bass guitar manages to bring the auditory apparatus closer to the hammering with big breath. Mirko's drums are sly, using impervious, stubborn hand tones, where imaginative counter-rhythms, stop-and-go and probing percussions establish the effervescence of a whole that seems to escape itself. Then there is the considerable amount of space that the musicians allow themselves, the pauses, the entrances and exits that act as glue to the intentions. 

The Silent Lineage does not follow the pilgrimage of widowed bands of the past, nor does it go back to rummaging through the stars and rubbish, nor does it leap into the future like a drunken kangaroo. It defines immediacy, it documents, knowing full well that fools seek out references, preventing them from identifying truth and reality.  And it is here that the band shows its loyalty, its ability to fall into the restrictive funnel of musical genres, preferring to adopt the sweat, the silence, the chaos that unites souls in the ravenous territories of rehearsal sessions. We witness, therefore, the release of the seed of their greatness, that uniqueness that links research and sodomises indifference. 

The brevity of the compositions offers the possibility of better historicising the scratches, the bumps, the bows to dreams, fraudulent, lukewarm, diving into life with little breath.

They play, they paint, they mess around with history by addressing themselves to a restrictive mode: they do not need redundancies, bumpy effects to nullify feelings. Here, I would emphasise that the compactness stems from erasing the assumption that their music is a sonic promenade, like clothes in search of applause.

Absolutely not: whoever listens to these eight songs sees a few rays, but in their power the truth is grasped and exposed to torture, which is magic (not white, let alone black), allowing the artistic apparatus to be a precise prophylaxis of a search that cures pain.  When what is experienced is without instructions, disorientation becomes the most sublime joy: getting lost becomes a resource and Sacred Legion know how to regroup the senses, in the disharmonic and marvellous nocturnal wanderings, with subtle but powerful insights. The album interrogates, it exhorts, it does not pretend, it offers shamanic propensities to the rejection of history in its manifest violence and, to better index the listening, it structures the music around seasons that, as they mix, fall, become unrecognisable. Winter is the season of these perceptions. Let us now follow their footprints and thorns, one by one...

Song by Song

1 - Flower Phantoms 

The entrance of this volcanic process is slow (the song with the longest minute count), like a strategic nuclear move, it enchants with a guitar arpeggio and a martial march of the drums, to obsequious sound in the tinkles that surround the perceptions. Then, like a scimitar slipping through the veins, the acceleration is witnessed and it is a leap into the belly. The seeds are sown, in the refrain, of a modality that envisages two voices in the song, as if to swell the listening for a better reception. Pillar, lead, indicative of a direction that will expand its energetic propensity for scorching sounds.

2 - Back to Nowhere

The three become privateers, the guitar and bass marry the electric dance, with the rhythmic carpet reducing the snares and offering powerful, dry beats. These are epidermal scratches that create a collision, shattering cognitive space, returning, in the end, to a place capable of dispersing every cardinal point.

3 - Purify

The melodic, initial search presents an approach to courtesy, to the ease of those who suffer this kind of sonic propensity. But the band refuses to be simplistic and tosses off the beginning in the swirl of ravenous, wounded sounds as they lose gravity. Right here, in these few seconds, the drumming twists the steps of the rhythm and becomes the sovereign ruler over the guitar and bass. The singing knows discretion, diving into the misfortune with elegance, without screaming, following the lead of the words...

4 - Dig Me No Grave

Centimetres and metres of glam rock precede the progression, allow the bass to pine away in an epic distortion and then away, as in a day of pain without a thermometer, into the exponential confines of an ankle-hammering horror rock.

5 - A Taste of Turmoil

Gravity slips, the track becomes a post-mortem recital, an ordeal of jolts, bringing to mind the graffiti of Killing Joke's second album and the first vague sounds of Southern Death Cult, but nothing settles in those heavy boulders and, as a forced choice, the three sailors decide to invent sound waves that lead them into the earth's subsoil: speed, which seems to be the pilot of this shipwreck, is actually given by the writing of a lyric full of radioactive miracles.

6 - Black Sun Ritual

Echoes of CCCP's Punk Islam open the dances, putting distance between them and the Emilian band. Everything becomes mystery, the blood comes out, the slowness, the sonic crescendo establishes a strategic plan: everything must arrive like a hypothesis and become precise like a form of prayer. A hiss pilots the impetuous action and the sonic rarefaction descends to meet the bass that uncovers the past of this sonic rush. Instead of the guitar, it is Tony's instrument that is grating. As a challenge, to be decisive, the song offers ample musical challenges, with Fabiano's vocals disappearing towards the end, as if sucked into a strange, mephistophelian ritual.

7 - Hole In The Heart

The bang above the sky of Frosinone: with the attitude of a hard-core cluster of inches, the track presents the coexistence of ardour and rejection, with the sounds perfectly circumscribing the words. In the stylistic search, note how the track suspends itself, returning to the scratch of the initial harmonic turn to accommodate a brilliant female voice that disorients and conquers.

8 - Shards

We come to the end of this cursed fresco in a state of grace with the song offering its sides to various, probable and obvious juxtapositions, but Old Scribe rejects them. The three do not seek originality, peaks from which to look down on any defeated colleagues. Instead, they throw themselves into the lava labyrinth to leave a trail of hissing roughness, to stun, certainly not to bewitch, thus giving the composition a brilliance that distinguishes it from the others. It experiments, seizes the chance of a becoming and writes the future of this band that made its debut by making the night tremble...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

6th March 2024

https://batcaveproductions.bandcamp.com/album/the-silent-lineage