My Review: Iamnoone - The Joy Of Sorrow

Iamnoone - The Joy Of Sorrow

Whether it is confusion or clarity that generates an oxymoron such as the title of this album is not known and perhaps it is better: with such doubt turbulent skies full of dancing, with salt on the wounds as mischievous smiles spread and go, nomadic and unhappy, on a dance hall where hypnosis is the Italian duo's trademark, although many things have changed (for the better) to make these twelve compositions a farewell to the past and a wet embrace of the future.

Philippe and Seth reveal an osmosis that astounds, with a compactness that cannot fail to go viral when one has the illusion that their ‘old’ beauty and depth is still evident.

But there is no doubt that the propensity is to create a circle of sonic desirability that knows how to be a gentle invocation to share these truly intense pearls, which fly in the meanders of a turbulence educated by an intelligent use of electronics, in which the guitars seem to have disappeared and massive doses of harmony are encountered that nourishes the joy of pain...

The freshness, the hypotheses elaborated in the minds of the two, the blackish incendiary instincts, the pleasant toxicity of pressing rhythms, the lyrics that scrutinise and hold back, stacks of granitic motions to pick up the corpse of musical genres now consolidated by precariousness and an increasingly minimal sense of resistance, make all this something necessary.

Iamnoone become a pair of volatile dinosaurs, and specifically two argentavis magnificens, capable of grabbing the corpses of our brains and bringing them into the atrium of their artistic work in the South American mountains, for an alcoholic and robust mass, with rituals that make the soul sweat and the emotions stir. Darkness found itself inevitably changed: the band does not intend to give advice but, as wise art should, lights a candle on the debris and sows doubts, invites us to follow this dancing ship into trajectories that turn time into a frightened spinning top, with class.

Musically, it is often on the side of an ebm that is never exaggerated, with ancient coldwave flows that make the whole thing yet another forced yet perfectly oiled marriage.

As for the singing, it becomes more melodic, cadenced, and vibrant, with, in addition, the ability to better juggle vocal registers.

But then there is the undeniable feeling of a lethal study of the shrunken dust that has become thoughts, with loneliness and sadness united in a spring dress without a zip, with the desire to bounce through truly magnetic synths these two elements increasingly linked to inevitable decline.

The Eighties fall before this intellectual progression.

The useless sounds of the Nineties are put on the bench.

The topics of the last two decades remain, but the mode of expression changes, deviates and moves swiftly towards the removal and annihilation of those heavy chains that were imitation and the inability to generate fresh air in the groove.

Can one be fresh with death painted in the notes? If you wrote this record, certainly: and it is amazement welded with rays that smell of heavy metal.

Short introductions, the essential body of the tracks quickly identified and then off with nuances, dry arrangements and the sense of rush that never leaves us, which make this work a cloud not yet able to be considered toxic but certainly dangerous: there are many people who fear dark beauty and here they will not get a moment's respite. 

One feels the pleasantness of the presence that is not merely descriptive of a recent past, as, as the listening continues, one imagines the whole thing being born in that very instant and in doing so we find ourselves before the miracle of self-judgment.

The Joy Of Sorrow becomes a mystery that seeks an interview, an increasingly rigged dice game of an impudent and vibrant pyramid, with Sin being invited by the two to throw down the aces. Those of the musicians are full of mathematics and an incandescent pentacle, adept at directing the gaze towards its five points and placing themselves in the twelve tracks, to cover them with magic and a dense atmosphere.

Relationships, time, space, and intellectual magnets that seem to be uncompromisingly expendable, make for radiant listening, even if there is no doubt that the echoes that dwell in the head will vibrate those who hold our destiny in their hands.

It is essential to give prominence to the refrains that often reveal Seth's concentric imagination, faithful in its power and ability to give melodic traits a heightened and propulsive sense: his bass is a treatise on chemistry applied to Philippe's melodic fantasy, to meet in the ballroom of a party where lonely souls weep and dance to the sound of these songs, to immerse truth within the denial of a future and where, incidentally, nihilism has nothing to do with it.

Faithful to Andreas and Suzy Herrmann's Cold Transmission as in a pact in which mutual esteem flows into a party in the German black forest, this combo transfers the Italian film made of sweat and disenchantment inside the proverbial Germanic pragmatic sense, to generate an unhappy happening in a delightful way, with the aggravation of songs that will remain warriors in time, precisely in this one that seems to prefer fall and incapacity. 

Everything is a corrupted echo, the senses put to the bar full of plastic and busy transistors, the rhythm that allows no pause and the music is a blueberry factory that settles on the lips of these compositions, in a sensual manifesto that makes eroticity a pleasant ordeal.

Fertile, galvanised by their trajectories on the candelabra of a clandestine day, they magnetise the now sterile post-punk with saline solutions that give that blackish brio by which they have always been fascinated. On this album they transform the potential into an elaborate scene where Fura dels Baus performs with them in holding back the darkness and turning it into a new stone to be thrown from the centre of the stage.

Powerful, winking, seductive, the last act of this sphere seeks chalk claws, with their attention turned to the perimeter where they sit solutions to be activated: they do it brilliantly, forging character with these conversations that salivate and spit out life to be consumed with simplicity, casting a paradoxical fear on them as, for real, one should not be fooled by the luminous games of these keyboards, because the best joke is disguised as misleading simplicity

Now let us dance and descend to the slippery floor to sip absinthe and Fernet Branca...

Song by Song

1 - In Fear

The stuttering, unstoppable Fear is the one to whom the two have given the task of opening the rainbow of uprisings: a gentle farewell from their outstanding Together Alone of 2023, to grant the illusion that their path would be similar. But no. Just listen to how the track's progression leads to a faux-sunny opening, as never before...

2 - This Is Forever

The old Clock Dva and Front 242 might whisper the opening pattern, but then it's flight, progression, a pressing of life with an eternity that leans on the lapidary bass and the vertigo of wisely circular electronics, while the voice seems to enunciate and preside over the decline of loss, which is nothing but the characteristic of this actuality destined to live in dying eternity...

3 - This, Fourth And Fifth

Partially neurotic, pulsating and magnetic, in reality this track lives above Olympus, in a day in which the old guitar seems to pop out to then allow Seth's fingers to be those of a merciless blacksmith. 

4 - MFM

Think of Kraftwerk as infants, simple and dreamy: take them to a clearing with a modern computer and the old Italian melodic genuflection, and here is this cancer on the neck looking for a break, without finding it: everything is a pressing march, an agitated whisper that shakes the soul in the night without lights...

5 - Soulless

The experimentation continues, the one that precedes the actual song: it is a feverish symptom, it is splitting, shaking and then becoming a magnet. Ancient hints of Giorgio Moroder and Cher in the musical part come forward and then it's a crossbow in the refrain, with notes like mental precipices, where the melody proves capable of connecting the Seventies and the present day.

6 - Ask The Wind

Bringing together a piano, a breath of wind and a sabre-rattling bass that Hooky's old fogey couldn't reproduce any more is a killer indeed, then a satin robe descends and crosses the air with Philippe's singing that hides the secret of its elegance very well as it seems to suggest questions rather than determine beauty with the decadent sound that lives in his torn uvula

7 - The Age Of Sadness

When the two insist on looping, in the adjacent areas of the arrangement this temple of enchantments and traps comes to life, one ends up whistling the polemical flow of sadness, which has become a boulder. But the ballistic prowess lies in the opening verses that push the mind to focus, to make interpretation something useless: better to travel in the images of these magnetic sounds, to use the lyrics as a truthful mirror of the dirty game of existence. 

8 - Fever

They take us by the hand with Italian disco-dance fragments from the Eighties, then put them in oil and wait for the sprouts of this keyboard that traces pins so dear to Orchestra Manoeuvres in The Dark. You fly, you stop in the clouds, and then it's beating cadence, it's totally feverish nocturnal seduction...

9 - The Labyrinth Is In My Mind

Here they are, the two from the early days, generous wizards inside bloody needles and threads: the darkest track is the only moment in which the old steps seem to rise again. Pure illusion: the bass with its martial procedure is enough to show how the past is a window to which they no longer look. The feeling remains, however, that like an affectionate encyclopaedia everything can still be studied and proposed, with some exciting mutation...

10 - 99 Angels

An opening song that could also close it, and that fortifies the fluid movements of dark textures, 99 Angels is the stroke of genius simplified: a bone structure well turned by ebm petals manages to devastate adjacent musical genres to become the mirror of what Iamnoone are today...

11 - Purity

Romanian-German songwriter Michael Cretu appears, playing with synths, but the two Italians suspend the notes to bring them back in movement, subtle and simple, in the refrain, with the vocal part blessing what resists wrapped in a white cloak...

12 - Pain

The unexpected becomes an act of glory, a subject of study and a remarkable force: Pain is the future of a musical past that is now nailed under the dust. Iamnoone revitalise, lubricate that period when food and drink were found in a few notes. Inclined to an artificial insemination of the time that was, it becomes a magnetic, reddish, truly unpredictable leave-taking, to allow joy to give pain the right measure of tireless punishment…

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

2nd October 2024

Iamnoone:

Philippe Marlat

Seth Dagodeus 

Music Label:

Cold Transmission

https://iamnoone1.bandcamp.com/album/the-joy-of-sorrow