Frenchy and the Punk - Midnight Garden
In a hypothetical day in the music kitchen, one cannot miss the appointment with New York, capable of ranging in proposals, very often succulent and attractive. They have a crazy flair there for mixing, creating, proposing new trends and polishing their past to make it always exciting.
They are faithful to something more than a mere technical exercise: they always visit the mystery, the restlessness, the disappointment, the criticism, the freedom of cultural movement in order not to leave this art on the ground.
It takes a duo, fierce in the right way, to sweep away the boredom, the fear, to joust the light inside a cloak full of electricity and remarkable seismic propensities, like a set of cold hours in the heart of summer. Samantha Stephenson and Scott Helland we know them well: they are lovers of the gamble, never prone to copying clichés but prone to generating weeds in their own path. Volcanic, powerful, they experiment with suggestion, capturing the sympathies of the succession of chords and mood panoramas by combusting words and carpets full of warmth and continuous hypnosis, touching emotional planes to freeze them in a swirling ideological manifesto that disturbs the oneiric effervescence, developing its waves with rippling rhythms of silver rings and pins.
A complete vibrancy, a friend of darkness without the propensity for depression, the whole work resembles an imprint full of slime and introspective sacrifice, in a hard work of analysis, to allow the two artists to reach heights never previously touched, while always producing excellent material. But in this latest episode of an exciting career one sees eclipses, thunderstorms, one smells a modern sacredness that draws on symbols in obvious parade.
A celestial gridiron that starts from Post-Punk to erudite the audience of free-spirited stars, inside the meanders of a continuous dizziness, a radiant adventure made up of nine episodes, to converge the past of that urban ensemble in a meeting where the pulsating electricity of constantly high-tempo songs allow one to sweat and find oneself damp in the glances.
But there is a connection full of enthusiasm in bringing into the notes a theatricality that incorporates cabaret and shoots arrows, in a state of deadly siege, hailing the purity of funky stylings camouflaged but sounding like the daughters of Talking Heads first enchanting album. The rhythmicity, the harmonic games of crazy, voluptuous keyboards induce the dynamics to be always connected with madness. We visit eastern territories, travel to Ireland, move through time, but the references, and any assonances, are shimmering deceptions, wonder and flaying ecstasy.
The fury takes on the connotations of an erudite sound slap, devoted to insistence and not wasting the heat of the blood in its creative maturation. Samantha's voice is a rosary held in the palms of her hands, ready to fly through the sky, without a parachute, fearless, modulated and nurturing, who has certainly gone to school, getting an idea of what singing has been in the past. Throwing clay on the floor of her mental kitchen, she has generated new vessels, using her uvula as a windmill, where power and determination are companions on pelvic, grape-scented journeys, constantly ripening.
The garden, frequented by the band at night, is a rose garden of mutant colours: it is the feelings that modify their DNA and Samantha and Scott seem to paint the indispositions, the tremors, the doubts, with brushstrokes that know how to tighten their partnership with the quivering, surrounding nature and human beings, with their sensual flashes, to allow the whole an invitation to condense life into the unlikely chance of escaping their design.
An undeniable ability to flap the wings of esotericism and the primitive form of existence of natural human impulses ensures that the songs are interconnected, with an unceasing blessing given by the melodic propensity to be rough but refined, in the stage of contradictions that end up blissfully confusing the listener. It is an ecstatic album that makes the body a dancing machine with burrs at the mouth: one never gets used to welcoming compositions that seem to be born as the notes advance. And it is pure, vitamin miracle, a windowless joy bouncing off the walls of ecstatic solitude.
They enthuse to the point of exhaustion with the impression of a new chapter for this duo: not just a war machine with new strategies, not just a meticulous attention to not making images the main protagonists, but a painting of instinct perfectly connected to a crater revealing atoms of earth slipping into their fruit, first unripe and then ripe to the right point.
They are tracks that take care of us, dilating breaths in their funnel, where speed is equal to intensity, in a spectral game in which the tension is never lacking on the part of their generator, and the cells of a primitive memory find the right time, in the whiteness of the midnight garden…
It is still rock, an artistic act, something that comes from the hemisphere of mystery to stop and find residence in the delirious and wonderful connection with sound, where one finds mini-guitar solos (the opening Midnight Garden, a dazzle within the howl of ravenous wolves), the mass of weeds looking for a place to run (Skip Boom), the gothic rock of Fields Of The Nephilim provenance (Hypnotized), but which then veers into a dilated funky phrasing that is wisely darkened.
With Immortal we are in the centre of perfection: pop, art-rock, cabaret raise glasses of sugar-filled wine suspended by a vibrant guitar, with scratches refreshed by a perfect arrangement.
Like In A Dream is the only track that at first makes us think we've heard it before: Lucretia My Reflection by Andrew Eldritch's band (The Sisters Of Mercy) seems to reintroduce itself, but it is a trick, a pleasant deception that lasts little because of its continuation that takes us to other shores, theirs, of this artistic couple that draws philosophical strategies, making listening a continuous encyclopaedia.
The atmospheres of the sixth track (Mr Scorpion) are a golden candelabra, a stage on which Greek tragedy finds its rightful show, meticulous, sensual, scratching, illuminating the mountains on a day of lunar eclipse.
The opening attack of Sleepwalk Shuffle reminds us of the imaginative voracity of The Cramps, the eclecticism of Xtc, the ease of The Slits, the mystery of Talking Heads, to direct the sounds into a portentous guitar riff that with the vocals packs quite a punch.
Let your amazement host the hypnotic massing of sounds and the tendency to change rhythms, modes and atmospheres that make Lighting Up The Sky a masterful contrivance, with impressions of cowboy boots in Sergio Leone's western saga, to touch on Lene Lovich's shoulder.
The concluding End Of An Era is a process of shifting altos in the earthquake-ridden autumn sky, with a double loop, musical and vocal, that nails and makes us rationalise the experience of the whole work: a gentle lament, an acclamation, an implacable repetita iuvant that materialises obsession, fixing perfection and making us truly lucky…
https://frenchyandthepunk.bandcamp.com/album/midnight-garden
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