My Review: Black Rose Moves - Summer Of Sorrow

  Black Rose Moves - Summer Of Sorrow

Can you dance feelings and thoughts that are shrouded in clouds, in discomfort, in the sand that makes your skin a powder keg, between claustrophobia and anxiety-filled dreams and the desire to melt into a surrender hidden from the spotlight?

If you listen to Summer Of Sorrow, by the Birmingham duo, you realise you can do it, with certainty and firmness, and find yourself in touch with a conscience that suggests devotion and loyalty. A reverberation, an evident echo of a glorious past, the celebration of two conjoined musical genres seem to be the elements to define what one listens to, but the song is an astonishment that only appears entirely after careful study, as particles of novelty live within it, an attitude that seems to be hiding, like a nebula in a space storm, where everything may as well go unnoticed.  And the prayers of the lyrics become stalagmites to reach the vault of heaven. As for the musical structure, we find ourselves with Post-Punk dressed in mystery and the water vapour of a velvety Dark-Wave as it drowns its petals in unease, for a result that galvanises sadness and makes it lucid. The synth and bass, straight and rigid, balance the emptiness with which everything unfolds, in an evident and transcendental magnitude, while the voice asserts truth and commands the emotions, joining them to the dance that preceded them.

In the apparent simplicity of its structure, the song proceeds as if embalmed by those neurotic sharp touches of the guitar and the mighty lashings of the bass, but then it frees itself of all that with that synth that seems to sum up the words and the method of the singing, to take away oxygen and immobilise our limbs. It is a captivity that has the stigmata of a grey fairy tale, for adults, on a day when the tsunami of thoughts invades the edges of our defences.  One gets the impression that a sense of loss is detected in these notes, that a bleak smile is distributed and that there are no releases, no escape routes, that a truth is celebrated that we try to deny, to emphasise that freedom often resembles a stupid form that denies the reality of our existences. A debut that sublimates intelligence, that embraces minds that live with a sense of abandon by bringing back the beginnings of an art (that of music) that not only photographs things, but makes them perceptible to the touch...

Idiots, the majority, will only notice what appear to be the remnants of the glory of a few well-known and often misused bands: the Old Scribe invites you not to fall into the trap and instead to indulge in the joy of mysterious vibrations that have no petals from the past. The world has taken a turn for the worse and this song establishes contact with consciousness and the ancient connection to dance, perhaps the only way we can avoid flogging our souls repeatedly.  The shadows, the darkness, the madness of evident frustration, are here put in constant communication, with the guitar loop guiding towards the territories where our thoughts can find refreshment and blessing, in a romantic and mephistophelian expression that chills the breath. Everything appears like a dress full of cobwebs, of rips, slipping through the minutes with the modern grace of two magnets that take care to generate an atypical, anomalous, seductive refrain, embedded in the verse divinely, in a mood landscape that is not inclined to change.

Mark Neat and Grant Leon catechise the Gothic newcomers by teaching them to pay attention, doling out minutes that only seemingly conform to the history of a musical ribaldry too often exalted by its people, made up of almost indemonized followers. Instead, the duo turns to individuals, in a lonely scene not at all inclined to sanctification: there is work to be done on oneself and the two succeed. So let this resounding single be a cause for reflection, with extinguished candles and dark areas finally acclaimed with respect, in order to outline a different perspective. The song deserves all this and more: give summer a new dress, possibly without silly fluorescence, and hand over the balance of reality to the dance that unites...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

9th June 2024

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbLAm61ep38