My Review: Healthy God - Poison, healing, poison poison

 Healthy God - Poison, healing, poison

What an absolute marvel it is to be surprised again, after a lifetime of listening to music, and to experience such precise, clear and fluorescent joy?

The whole thing is organised by a lonely soul, an Italian author, from Milan, who took a trip to London to return to Italy, to the warm and welcoming Sicily.

What we are about to experience is an experience that envelops the senses and scatters them in time (musical knowledge and memory are extremely important in this listening), in the places that have made music an unquestionable temple where quality, value, and the sense of operating with precision reign supreme, mapping skills that always come in handy.

Daniele chases the shimmering clothes of pleasure, patrols the movements of pain by placing a hand over them to protect it, throws himself into the lacerated corridors of regrets and remorse, establishes a sonic contact with the crystalline and seductive electronics of Suicide, grafts pills of post-punk without exaggeration, writes a treatise on mysterious psychedelia with wax masks, and certainly doesn't neglect to baste a touch of Alternative to give moments of lightness in which the obvious class raises a smile, while in the surroundings the scream of difficulty pushes to prevail. These seven compositions, however, demonstrate a strategic balance, to make his music a complete menu, digestible, with multiple flavours and with the final surprise of being able to smell an intense perfume from the notes resting on a stave that seems to have been written among abandoned houses, steelworks and psychotropic raids.

Everything seems to be an analysis that, starting from being exploratory, is able to suggest an opening in which the conscious and the unconscious discuss in order to determine a reality that, in addition to being clear and precise, is able to push attention towards a direct participation on the part of the listeners.

Songs like intermittent signals, multiple SOSs, harried runs, villages painted by a mind aware that the landscape, in order to be comprehensible, must be experienced. And here the artist jumps, with a parachute that certainly comes from the early seventies, into the articulated electronic structures, capable of channelling resounding beats, imaginative and powerful drumming, acid guitars that work to fray the nerves of English history, to establish the enclosure of his fervid and fertile mind. One has the feeling that there are twenty and not seven songs that we can listen to: a fact that already reveals the power of a record that is a tractor intent on ploughing the listeners into obedient grains of earth.

The voice, the singing, the lyrics: how long has it been since the Old Scribe heard a compact like this, with the ability to move, worry and make one question? It is striking how the drama is combined with a strange sweetness, a poison that seems to shift towards the liquid that can recall the fragrance of perfumes that can stun.

The register is often high, the method is that of short, dry, well-pronounced words in English, and the skilful and truly profound ability to become one with the music. There is a sacredness in this record, a truly effervescent use of structural changes that broaden the scope of possibilities: it is like embracing a rifle and finding bullets of different types in the barrel and, when your finger presses the trigger, the explosion is a black and white rainbow that challenges the coloured one.

Without hesitation, let's get close to these thunderous and well-combed compositions, in order to feed on a work that I hope will succeed in intriguing you and give matter to your impulses, with the intention of being at the end of listening more disciplined in welcoming such a powerful album...

Song by Song

1 - Eternal Internal Fight 

An opening synthpop in the odour of Human League immediately shakes the skin, which, as the seconds go by, finds itself in the throes of an electropop scouring. It is as if we are listening to the sacred silence of a procession of intentions outside an abandoned shed.

2 - Can't Go On Can't Let Go

The pursuit of the subtlest post-punk, its howl polluting the sun, presents us with a track in which the guitar displays the story of its development with great intensity, with a modulated, powerful and at times husky vocal that impresses. And that arpeggio that appears before the refrain smells of immensity, like drops that from the American history of Television come to the present day...

3 - White Walls

It starts in 1971, the year Suicide was born, and picks up acid guitars, a loop that oxidises and corrupts. Then the guitar widens the suffering and drops all the bricks of these white walls ready to be tinged with grey...

4 - The Dance

Back comes the New York duo (Suicide) just long enough to show the beginning of a howl that seems to have tentacles of compressed musical genres, intent on keeping the origin a secret, in a hustle and bustle that remains convincing for the entire one hundred and fifty-two seconds

5 - Catholic Guilt

Here is the most intense and seductive song, an extension of concentric elements that cleverly let out oxygen bubbles: everything is here waiting for scratches and sound investigations that dismantle many convictions. Ultravox appear, you can hear the work of Cabaret Voltaire in searching for a concept and defining it, then entering with the almost comatose singing into the poetry of the investigation. The rhythm is a rambling, between swings and dives into the void....

6 - This Is Not A Game

Drops of noise coming from the stuttering lips of the Liars are just the pretext for writing a dramatic, syncopated track with minimalist but quite effective beats, and then giving the guitars the chance to generate splendid stellar chaos

7 - All These Sufferings Must Lead Somewhere

Three hundred and one seconds of pure hypnosis, in a variety of modes, under the banner of a slow but cunningly prodigal rhythm in channelling attention towards an analytical game where only the voice seems to want to range between sweetness and melancholy. The guitar, straight out of The Cure's Seventeen Seconds, acts as the glue to this strategic scattering of seeds, in a vortex with an intense, overwhelming and mystical climax. We weep metal tears, experience the frustration of pains that crouch like hyenas waiting for our weakness to convince them to attack us...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

20 April 2024

https://open.spotify.com/album/3H2W22PIH9hkzHatz8UlDv?si=xdhMhu62TzSJ8AR-SzhsEg