My Review: Kodaclips - Gone is the day

 

Kodaclips - Gone is the day

There are traces of adventure and others of research that establish ever-expanding cognitive flows, an energetic will to curry favour with sounds that isolate any unfinished emotional damnation.

From Cesena, a small town in the centre of Italy, a band writes its second album by negotiating deadly linguistic flows, creating bloodcurdling sonic signals, hypnotising the dawn of shoegaze in the mid-eighties, injecting a style that has refined itself and marginally touches the red-hot ranks of new Italian bands.

But evident in these songs are the sunny embraces, the melodic research more on the part of singer Alessandro Mazzoni than on the part of his guitars and those of Lorenzo Ricci, who are at once pincers and freezers of solutions often in the vicinity of a purified and disinfected noise.

The propensity is that of a combo determined to establish boundaries, attitudes, to give itself rules so that this tide of watts knows the sense of fulfilment and natural propensity to enliven the path of ideas increasingly imbued with those methods that American shoegaze in recent years has specified.

Fresh compositions, full of that melancholy that seems to be hiding but does not desire complete anonymity: a play of light and reflection through the classic four-piece line-up, determined to make noise a refuge, sound a partnership and the poetic form of song an armistice that works perfectly. The wild character is that of a controlled if generous feedback, but the excellent production of this second work brings out new gems, two surprising tracks that could probably be the outpost of a future that will consider the intuition of a deepening through psychedelia and an elaborate industrial.

The melodies are a contemporary flower that gets wrapped up in ancient traverses, in abundant and ravenous clichés in making a pact of serenity with these guys who, thanks to a remarkable bravado and obstinacy, seem uninterested in the copy-and-paste of this genre that, it must be said, suffers from guilty mass disregard.

There are those who have detected a set of post-punk sparkles, but Old Scribe disagrees: the band does not have that surrender or that overbearing attitude to extinguish life, rather they use an emotional spray to accelerate a form of contact that lives in a hypnotic wedge typical of dream-pop without having its specific musical characteristics, ending up as a sweet miracle.

Gone is the day is a voluntary pact with secrets, the cerebral movements of four individuals who sow flagrant detonations, in an ups and downs of notes that often scratch the skin and the heart. Everything is compact, an expressive form typical of the concept: not the theme, not a story, but sounds rooted in a path that tells the genesis of a series of encounters, rejecting chance, to finally generate just over thirty minutes, in which time slips through the mists of snapshots that gather in an embrace.

It is a work that will not meet with the approval of the Italian public, stupefied by useless chasing after ridiculous homologation. And this is a good thing: there are no elements of precariousness or superficial theories in these compositions that would make the listener feel useless...

Instead, he will find consideration in those who know how to study, to touch the centre of gravity of these effervescent creations. 

If this were not enough, questions arise tepidly, because it is precisely the mystery of this work that allows our minds to create enclosures in which to confine astonishment and sweetness.

Chaos is controlled and pushed to introspection through a truly impressive analytical work.

The time has come to go and define these ten tracks and place in the outpost of our intelligence a bundle of curiosity...

Song by Song

1 - Glaze Over

A rhythmic impact, the lunar crossover of a warm, grey bass with guitars devoted to harmonic flights opens this work and it is immediately enchanting: where impetuosity tries to offend, Glaze Over summons time in a dreamy dance...

2 - Violet

The rhythm is kept high, Alessandro Mazzoni's voice visits Sarah Records and Francesco Casadei Lelli's drumming insinuates itself into the muscles with staccato, stop-and-go sessions that allow the two guitars to warm up the clouds of the early nineties...

3 - Gone is the day

Catherine Wheel's melodic lash of Ferment finds perfect grandchildren: it's lunar catharsis, it's a primitive animalistic force that passes through these slanting guitars and this bass that seems to make the sound fall... A poem can have a syncopated rhythm and the good intention of guitars that explore the belly of a time now full of melancholy

4 - Interlude

Just over a minute, but a crater finds a way to leave a lava without light: a mysterious interlude that creates suspense, visiting a form that aligns with the search for minimalist sounds...

5 - Failure

Here it is the hypnotic ballad that marries the sweetness of conspicuous textures, of careful vocal incursions that specify a splendid guitar phrasing to the point of giving the bass-drums duo the voice that covers this jewel. And then it's roar emanating from pedals and ideas that kiss good taste...

6 - Deadlock 

Pixies, Nirvana, Melvins: they could be the grandfathers of this splendid introduction, but never make the mistake of being sanguine as, after a few seconds, the hemisphere of this sound vault goes much further and to very different places. And so it finds itself in the sweet custody of a captivity that, when it wishes to expand, becomes a nocturnal volcano...

7 - Fall Apart

Here it is, swift and sexy, a comet that welcomes insights, stealing our breath and taking us towards the sound carpets dear to an unknown plethora of bands from Bristol and Brighton, back when the two cities were veritable industries of sonic outburst variations. Aggressive, tightrope walking, with the two guitars taking away safeties like witches to give us joy, ending up dancing in the waves of the sky...

8 - Number 87

A perfect song to underline the compositional maturity of the band from Cesena: everything seems to revolve around a riff that matures and engages, treasuring an alchemy evident with the period of an effervescence typical of adolescence, but the mature sound and the direction of these mechanics suggest a precise attention, because in the smoky tail of the sound hides a remarkable sensory embrace

9 - Surface 

Blood bubbles create moody vapours, a frenetic mode close to ancient industrial distributes mystery and suggestive vocations, in a slow and cacophonous horror, where the song form is destroyed, wisely, and the system of probing is used, through explicit sounds that tell more than a thousand words.

And it is tribal confusion, unease that knows wisdom and that shreds every musical painting previously expressed on the album. If there is an Everest in this record, here it is: from here one can see the band's capacity to go beyond itself..

10 - Sleep, Doom, Shelter 

How to end a track like this? With an atypical lullaby, misleading, but generous, at the same time, towards the sound of these gentlemen who range in jacks, imbued with sadness, with a vocal that expresses a moving propensity for words proudly displayed, while small explosions of guitar continue the contagion of this melancholic sound...

Alessandro Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

4th September 2024