My Review: Desperate Journalist - No Hero

Desperate Journalist - No Hero

There are veiled scratches of nostalgia in the crowded lanes of London, a city that has once again come to dominate the scene in this 2024, which swagger through a precise documentation of pop toxins in copious doses, to make up for the time. And this band, in its fifth work, succeeds in its personal descriptive summit to complete a long journey, approaching an increasingly noir style in a graceful way but with the accuracy to deviate to new places, making important use of keyboards and synthesisers, with lyrics that make it clear that if there is a place where music can be heard and seen with these compositions, everything is hooked with extreme precision.

The range, colourful, polite, soft, towards genres that derive from old presences, with high-sounding names to act as guarantors (The Cure, The Cranberries, Saint Etienne, Black Box Recorder in the first instance), is just a cue, an excuse, a strategic move, a mackintosh in the Soho district to tickle, unfairly, any attempt at comparison and classification.

Instead, the four pirates of the mood are intent on making notes an abacus to be placed in the discomfort of the weathering of the senses, with that drama that overrides any possible alignment and coupling on our part: there is no place in this character outpost for an identity that is finalised in understanding.

Rob Hardy’s Les Paul is a pyrotechnic synthesis of jingle jungle fragments, of dream pop effusions, with a post-punk catharsis held beautifully centred more on the perpendicularity of the sound than on its curves.

And it is ecstasy, a joy that also rises up thanks to Caroline Helbert (call her Caz, please), a drummer lent to the beauty of wandering clouds with her constant strategies to make, of rhythm, a rush often aided by patterns that seem unashamedly intense. Simon Drowner plays bass as if invited to take responsibility for shaping the gravitational lanes of Jo Bevan, the best interpreter of noir pop today, without a doubt. 

The apparent detachment from previous productions is remarkable: each track seems like an episode in itself, such a unique act of presence that, in no way forced, once the others gravitate around it, everything makes sense. No concept, but rather an anchoring of artistic necessity to a melodic performance that allows for recalls, lurks and a great desire for isolation, between dances and perpetual reflections.

The solos, for example, are incorporated to emphasise the mood, its sorrowful pouring, its fragrance within an alchemical presence of the dream factor, a constant in the London band since time immemorial, but which in this record really seems to tear the tears from our chests.

Whispers, vibrations between rhythmic and arpeggiated electric guitars are assembled in the thin cylinder of a tight grip caused by the skilful use of electronics.

One travels through alternative, post-punk, post-rock, dream pop and even drops of psychedelia to progressive. All this happens while the catchy, easy-going side (to wit: the choruses) is all hopelessly sexy and bloated with fertile redundancies of joy.

But there really is no denying how listening costs commitment, with the digestion of certain moments making us make a pleasurable effort: the artists do not give in, they do not let themselves be beguiled even by their own intentions before going into the studio. Yes to pop but with refined respect for their past, for the miles and hours travelled to cross their eyes with our emotions.

Note how the sound, clean and direct, contrasts with the drumming, sophisticated, sometimes jazzy, in a circuit of influences that tend to affect the complexity, giving a necessary study.

The evocative power of the lyrics now experiences an unbreakable marriage with Jo: this voice is truly capable of doing what Björk and Dolores O'Riordan attempted to accomplish in the 1990s. She manages to turn around the meaning by modulating and flirting often with slight changes in register, always coming across as credible even before the words settle into our understanding, as if she knew how to precede us and our diary of notes.

Chorality, emphasis, drama, tension and an avalanche of scratches come out of its mouth with the music trying to act as a clip, failing (in the benevolent sense of the expression), and being skilful, instead, in making us realise how much more cohesive the four of them are than other more well-known and admired bands.

The themes described and the mode seem to come from a past that has a magnifying glass on what is to come: the most dramatic part of these compositions sounds like a sad party while fireworks go wild in the sky...

A resounding work for integrity, for an identity that does not have the visa for success, given the ignorance of the masses, but which makes their work an oscar to artistic merit...

Now it's time to delve into this record, song by song, to reap the amazement and give it its rightful sceptre...

Song by Song

1 - Adah

The guitars of The Cure's Seventeen Seconds open the dances, while angel Jo's voice prefers to hijack and wedge itself into the dimension of a windstorm with its rises and falls. A biblical compactness surrounds the few notes of synth and Rob Hardy’s six-string, which also passes by Johnny Marr's parts. Tense, nervous, with a venomous edge that takes your breath away....

2 - No Hero

Once upon a time there was C-86, then Dream pop, and there were atmospheres that involved fast trains to get to the refrains with exuberance. And that's what happens here, with the vocals stretching the words as Caz Helbert's drumming knows how to frustrate her companions on this truly melancholic journey. The guitar in the finale takes us back to the Au Pairs and the Cranberries, in an unexpected and calamitous union...

3 - Afraid

Simon Drowner is an angelic-fingered bass player, capable of holding up a melodic line until it becomes the lane on which Caz and Rob build a jewel of nineties sentiment, then descending into a marvellous drama with the piano outlining a regret gathered in an almost mute dance

4 - Comfort

Pet Shop Boys, Erasure and Yazoo: three old entities are recalled in this track, with their pop movements, and the feeling that the electronic side is warmer than a ballad... A slow but inexorable progression towards the refrain, where everything comes together in a simultaneity unimaginable at the beginning. 

5 - Silent 

The gem, the superstar, the queen of hearts who goes out and makes havoc for the world: when decadence seeks silence, here come these notes in which the guitar hints at revisiting sublime moments of 4AD, only to move away and seek a softer focus. The singing is a work of art, between vibratos and tense strings, swollen with hallucinating condensates of truth, destroying all illusions. Sad as only pop can be, this gem also offers a keyboard full of blood and guitars close to the Alan Parson Project, to make a perfect musical circle...

6 - Underwater 

The most laboured moment, the artistic spark that ignites the sense, the gravity, the magnificence, shows itself with this impetus where everything seems syncopated, electric, unavailable to a pleasant conversion. Hints of post-punk guitars searching for shade, in the splendidly toxic sea of this electronic base that, with an industrial pattern, enhances the atypicality of this episode compared to the others. 

7 - 7

Dream pop within horror, in a vitaminic mirror with grey tones, in which The Cranberries sound like the grandchildren of attempted approaches, while Echobelly trace the power and robustness of a truly impervious but exhilarating harmonic skeleton

8 - Unsympathetic Parts 1 & 2

The longest track on the album is a light and dark flash, an incredible and joyful nonsense within an emotional circuit that seeks and finds dilations and changes, to arrive in the vicinity of a delirium where the refrain is a decadent algebraic scanned breath of great volume and intensity. Then everything goes back to being fog in Trafalgar Square, on a rainy day....

9 - You Say You are Lonely

The debut album seems to remind us of where these now grown-up foursome come from, never conceding to the stylistic imprint: a hinted atmosphere, in which the vocals act as the initial helmsman, to make us abandon ourselves to the unique note of a piano truly drunk with dark light, and then we die in this fertile beauty that finds a refrain so far removed from the present day…

10 - Consolation Prize 

Serious bands always put their best moment at the last act: if a farewell must exist, let it be great...

Consolation Prize is the blink of Big Country in guitars and Chameleons, the melodic line is a direct ovation to the faux-cheerful Cure, with the vocals reminding us closely of the lead singer of a band much loved by Robert Smith,  All About Eve ...

Mysterious, scratchy, it finds the ability in the chorus to be devastating as the handkerchief fills with holy water, thanks to the subtle no wave apex that clings to more flashy early eighties pop methods ...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

9th October 2024

https://desperatejournalist.bandcamp.com/album/no-hero