My Review: IAMTHESHADOW - To End What Never Began

IAMTHESHADOW - To End What Never Began

There are legends from ancient cultures, dispersed in the air but still alive. It sometimes happens that deep contemporary souls manage to get in touch with them and act as conduits and messengers, to expand unimpeachable truths, to make the darkness of the soul an expense for everyday consciousness. Where acquiring awareness means banishing ignorance and making the belly a thinking volcano.

Pedro Code is definitely a magician with this kind of ability and talent, the one who nowadays drags that era and those characters into his artistic work, a priest outside any religious order but able to transform us into beings blessed by his undeniable powers. His new work is an incredibly mobile simulacrum in which the cold marble freezes any escape on our part: a work that is simply crazy, enriched with a benevolently false modernity, because there is no doubt that in his hands there is an arcane yearning and a way of doing things in which the spirits of the past reside. Together with Vitor J. Moreira he puts on an undiplomatic show of destruction, alienation and torment, to the point of creating a glass bubble that falls on our skin.

Portugal becomes a cellar that takes flight with theatrical exuberance and magnitude, chilling the fearlessness of a reality that is already dying without its knowledge, and these songs smell of righteous punitive blasphemy, in a decadent transfiguration of intimacy, through a continuous tide of synths to paralyse time, a fact already included in the majestic and biting title, containing an inevitable paradox for us all.

Here is awareness becoming a flag lowered and over whose tatters stands the misty blanket of an archetype that holds back escape. The record (an apparent expanse of coldwave between gothic fires and a dark electro full of pins) is a slow procession of philosophical discourses between, precisely, legends and Pedro: dark games of millenary writing and listening create a blackish fluid, in which nothing can console and for this very reason dependable, majestic and disheartening in a stupendous way. 

The compact structure helps to grasp the depth of arguments with rust-filled chains, where the key to happiness has been thrown away in a day of total delirium. 

Aggressive, desperate but full of that sad sensuality that makes it perfect, this latest album never plays with existence and, on the contrary, gently slaps it in the face. It feels like watching old hands enter brains and leave mud and rotten moss: it is only the opening scene of this emotional bombardment that makes the band of the wonderful Cold Transmission an illogical guide before silence. Everything is a restrained cry, dispersed, dilated, imprisoned in a night where tears become the smile of pain.

The previous, excellent, The Wide Starlight, was still somewhat tied to the duo's past, between skill, effective means and quality. The new chapter not only certifies maturation, but specifies how a great cloak over the statue of their intellectual presence generates a rupture while preserving the dna, and it is here, in this enchanting contrast, that IAMTHESHADOW manage to diversify themselves and integrate with a project that is a catapult with long range.

The vocals and the mode of singing are truly a delirium of dull light, capable of passing through the throat and sinking into the heart, shattering the tissues it encounters. The music is a vessel that takes in fifty years of attempts, of false convictions and scourges them, simplifying everything with extreme clarity and sincerity: there is no pomposity, no manieristic traits of hardened tradesmen, but rather an ideal marriage between harmony, rhythm and essence, leading to a truly impressive stylistic skeleton.

An apologia that reaches the sacred, sublimating the laboured breath, and, despite the great use of electronics, seems only a screen of the compositions of the dead angels of two millennia ago. The notes fall into the path of silence, bending the backs of trees and leaves, of our cravings for an emptiness that does not empower us, but the band from Lisbon takes us by the hair sentencing, abjuring, tickling spells, dragging us to an altar where there is no forgiveness.

The lack of the burly, gravitational guitars of the first albums is an act of courage but above all a cunning manoeuvre of conscience: they no longer have a way of making the vicissitudes of tormented souls believable. Instead, these geometric and torrential intersections of synths, loops, combined with the faithful drum machine, confer the power of stun, jolting us to our feet, two centimetres from the abyss.

Adorable is the immediate expression of frozen lava that reaches your face, with keyboards like blades, deconstructed samples and an archive of secrets that shows only the tip of its hair. It is a continuous, fluid dance, in contact but not connected with the past: IAMTHESHADOW know how to stand out, to be out of the cauldron, out of the mould and to present a hefty bill as listening to this To End What Never Start is a purifying manifesto, an agglomeration of novelty given its character integrity and with the poignant aim of putting an end to idiocy. Like a life lesson between the notes, on a school day without recess, like a work day without pay, where there are no legacies but constant pressures...

It takes a sip of liquor that numbs the sight and other senses to be able to resist this act of cruel beauty, track after track...

Song by Song

1 - To End What Never Began

Time, with its dilation on hills full of dust, is represented by this instrumental opening, a set of moods capitalised by a keyboard that skilfully circumnavigates it, to make the pain palpable through a few but touching notes.

2 - Bleed Dry

The second single to anticipate the release of this new album is a torment that, through vocals and a surgical musical operation, pours the duo's ever-precise connection onto the listener, with compact descent into the mental circuits of those with multiple wounds. When dark electro lives with sparks in the magma of an obedient coldwave.

3 - This Vertigo

The tempo rises, in contact with the drama of a fading soul: a song that reminds us of Clan Of Xymox in their most disturbing period, as here we witness an electronic procession with skilful electric aggregation, for an incredible moment in which synths marry with a blackish pop.

4 - Pain Come Close

Here the first single finds in the context of the album even more expressiveness, sacredness, in its sad, sidereal, anguished dance. A marvellous act of simplification that sends shivers down your spine, as the keyboard is a hammer that alternates harshness and sweetness, while Pedro pontificates and blesses the lyrics with melancholic attitude.

5 - Changing Spaces

One finds oneself anchored in this wandering of places, here emphasised, manifested and skilfully described with silence creeping into the notes causing spasm and delirium. The scent is Darkwave, but on a Post-punk patina where the crossover makes this song a bridge from which to plunge our souls into the changing spaces beneath us...

6 - Seizing Emptiness

A summary, a slingshot, a pamphlet full of fire inside a clod of ice sums up an entire career but, in this album, translates and transports the bewilderment of existence into a dark electro circuit of remarkable intensity, through an unquestionable and incredibly warm linearity...

7 - Hell Is Where Your Heart Is

The Portuguese duo knows how to combine melody and drama: a pilot is hired to guide dreams inside a reddened, combustible sphere. Echoes of the eighties in tear-filled cellars leap into the sky, with the instrumental part thumping and vigorous, through a strategic and evil synth.

8 - All That You Might See

The introduction, those few seconds swollen with rotting salt, are enough to make this track the hiding place of our fears. Notes garrisoned by a cosmic scent, endorsed by a voice that cleans the sky, and the perception that there is a palpable blindness in these flagrant sensory activities...

9 - Next Belief

A leaden palette controls the heartbeat: a song that is ancient theatre, an avalanche of marine condensates, like free-flowing seaweed, advances on vapour-filled notes, in continuous suspension...

10 - Ties To The Lost

A feverish state settles in this dancing amalgam, a torment that defines the absolute explosiveness of loss, with a plot that advances, dilating just enough to become a God in search of resignation. Sad, merciless, searing, a lava bullet that sinks inexorably...

11 - A New World

The beginning makes us imagine Front 242 in Lisbon, but then it is all the Portuguese band's work that manifests itself in this territorial exploration, through a schematic foray into the dry puddles of soulless streets...

12 - As The Infinite Drowns

The concluding act is a dream that materialises, clearly, subtly, delicately, in its opening moment, and then seeks rhythm and twisting dramas: the singing produces that dose of shivers necessary to close the coat and begin a walk in the paths of an uncertain future. Rhythm is the throne on which the melody, dry and full of tears, creates a combination that provokes emotion...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

16th October 2024

https://iamtheshadow.bandcamp.com/album/to-end-what-never-began