My Review: The Palace of Tears - Veiled Screen, Woven Dream

 

ALBUM OF THE YEAR 2024

The Palace of Tears - Veiled Screen, Woven Dream

When one defines pain as an enemy, one totally loses the possibility to grow, to delineate the truth that develops consciousness and makes it visible and graspable on the alley of near-perfection, since the latter is not a human thing.

Art is granted the possibility of transforming the impossible into a corollary of planets in transit, while carrying on their shoulders the sword of Damocles to be dispersed among the constellations, having in return the emblematic capacity of catharsis to return purifying perceptions, conveying truth and transforming the value of perplexity.

We approach, with grace and respect, an album that consecrates the value of family, of mourning as an opportunity for rebirth, witnessing a diary that recounts the terrible loss of the singer's brother and the probable reunion of the two in a space that is not physical but mental.

Leah Kahn aka LV Darkling (voice, lyricist) is the one who directed the desire of the experience of her brother's celestial journey into verses and introspections that manifested themselves in a uvula capable of releasing black-feathered poetry and amniotic vibrations of unspeakable beauty. One is dazed, handcuffed, paralysed towards a path that transforms convictions into a darkness that determines different boundaries. And the most astonishing fact is that one arrives at different kinds of healings, while one's hands turn out to be wet and one's wrists trembling: one finds oneself inside life lessons that scratch the fear of the loss of what we would like to be infinite in order to understand, instead, that wisdom lies in the desire not to forget those who are precious to us.

Erick R. Scheid (guitars, electronics, engineering) is a magnetic arc of nuclear explosions held within a medieval ampoule that casts the contents of tarred sounds towards the present, elaborating structures around the globe, assimilating notions of physics and mathematics, with the depth of wild animal scratches to make the wounds justified. From there, his laboratory strives to diversify music, not as a stagnant and debasing place of musical genres, but as a birth where birth is the place of metabolisation of previous experiences. With his mind generating impulses, Erick inoculates tensions and vibrations in the exploratory circuit that makes slowness the place where the environment becomes concrete and is visualised by his instruments, with the mastery of one who translates thoughts by drawing paths in which getting lost is the real enjoyment, manifesting the will to bestow sacredness on these sound rivers.

The record becomes the medium through which the body temperature of dramas, of thoughts wrapped in thorns, is measured, but also the prerequisite for growing the breath of hope, giving it the sceptre of perseverance. Acute, profound, embarrassing for the motions that bring fears and discomforts closer, what one hears is a sign of divinities without identity, where adoration and sacrifice are not demanded but an important commitment towards the acceptance of what one fears living.

This leads to the assemblage which, through the sinuous apparatus of the use of electronics, makes compact the long process of sowing gothic glands, splashes of ethereal music propensities and guitars poised between shoegaze and ambient, surprising however in that the whole does not claim a separate identity, but a sensory orgy that frees one from presumption and becomes a boulder that resists temptation.

One lives in the certainty that these seven nocturnal jaws have emerged from a silent film of the last century, from a projector that translates the raids and slow processions and inserts them into moving images, to make the whole univocal, so as not to disperse the complexity of a scenic apparatus that rises at the end of the listening on a stage, in a theatre surrounded by souls eager to see this installation of timeless beauty played out. The soul is placed in a suitcase, the whole life inside a make-up in which the excesses of black are the access to the night sky and where symbols are the guardians of every mental opening: time guards the reflections, the amplexes of thoughts, everything overflows with intelligence and chaos becomes the blood brother that governs madness. Layers, immersions, flights slapping the vault of heaven until gliding over the sand of an unknown desert: what is experienced is an educational, sensorial listening, with memory writing to itself by recycling any waste, to evolve it into a monument that can smile.

New Orleans thus becomes the centre of a spectral, symbolic collection, in a welter of other agglomerations of distant and even recent times (Arcana, Lycia, Dead Can Dance, Ataraxia among the most immediate and intuitable), but with the unquestionable merit of being closer to an extrasensory dimension, making a healthy and abundant effort: given these conditions, the result can only be a process of total purification.

In addition to what has been described, there is no denying the romanticism that manages to immerse itself in the sonic swamps while always finding a way to breathe, to stand firm and to show its feathers: in addition to using one's ears well, one must also sharpen one's eyesight on this album. If you don't want to miss this almost completely vanished mode, you have to look well into these tracks and then a bouquet of roses will appear before your eyes.

Song by Song

1 - Black Obsidian Beyond Oblivion

A vault of micro-frequencies expands its purchasing power in slow procession and distributes the annexed sounds to the sky, in a slow embrace, driven by LV Darkling's contralto voice that sows petals of pain like a winter smile. Sacredness rules the place and one settles down with dignity, while small darkwave torches hint at their presence.

2 - An Echo in Time

A voyage, out of a tomb and brave, is entrusted to synths on military parade, ready to hit the target, then picking up pace and forwarding ethereal inclinations to the edges of an attitude in which gothic scrolls take us on the wings of time. The singing, here more hidden, suddenly veers towards the high register and we are all dreamy tears…

3 - The Embers of Your Being Glow Still

Twilight generates long-range shadows, incense spreads, guitars are sinuous shots in meticulous generosity, between veils and flashes, with the presence of millenary stones acting as celestial vigilantes. The dragons fill with fire and linger in the night moment to make the sky a roaring applause. Mysterious, many-formed, the song is a chaotic hypnosis dressed to attend the message of a blackish-feathered dove…

4 - Cimetière de l'Absinthe no.333

The solution is that of an instrumental track, fuelling moments of tension and the ancient propensity to wait, in a metallic cloud that expands perfectly polished electronic atoms, a wordless fable that knows the way to becoming a beautifully crafted horror film…

5 -Lair of the Undying

Mysticism, espionage (with the great eye writing down what happens), and a flight that embraces the night: the highest peaks of this clamorous work are reached, the music only genuflects to the angelic singing, but without losing heart it traces, with synth, bass and guitar and androgynous drumming, the path of lies in loss of authority. One experiences the refutation of death and fading to believe, rather, in a resounding return. And the music is not a frame, but an expanding landscape…

6 - Veiled Screen, Woven Dream

Here we enter into an apparent state of quiescence, one waits for the crushed grapes to take on a taste, and at the 90th second it happens: from that moment on, the album's title track becomes a chorus entrusted to stretches of distorted guitars, and the clump of dancing shadows is transformed into a canvas that, between darkwave and ethereal deposits, makes the whole thing become a meeting of souls seething with sacredness.

7 - The Serpent Bearer (feat. Unwoman)

The prophecies belonged to men who walked in the desert, instead in this last sonic delirium it is a priestess who performs this act of bravery against time: she touches the sky, she digs into the swampiest earth and the guitar touches are hints made visible by powers unknown to us. Like a long fade-out, the farewell to this incredible work is a reminder to us of the symptoms of pain, its consequences, with the generous intention not to beat but to spread gauze over our minds. Angels and demons sign the armistice and declare how this universe is ready to generate yet more new celestial bodies: the final touch on a walk that has brought life and death together under the hidden cloak of night…

Let the astonishment, the breathlessness, the hope, the sleight of hand be accomplices of this nucleus in eternal exhibition...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

6th April 2024

https://thepalaceoftears.bandcamp.com/album/veiled-screen-woven-dream-2