My Review: Midas Fall - Cold Waves Divide Us

Midas Fall - Cold Waves Divide Us

The lane of elegance has a remarkable space in dreams, a teeming of intact fragments that enthrall listening and viewing souls, transporting shadows into the spotlight. What ensues is ecstasy in repetition, amidst oscillations and tremors. Music can represent all this as conduit, investigation and a thick containing web. If the Scottish band Midas Fall does this, then myocardial paralysis is instantly guaranteed, as the genesis of fragility in search of oxygen. The duo (now a trio) performs the most remarkable miracle one could only remotely hope for: they write a live genuflection, an invisible concert, directly in our rooms, like a private, unique, hardly avoidable affair, to signal a first incandescent act of total falling in love, as the tail end of a long career in which the fifth disc does nothing more than collect, sow, invent from hypothetical oscillations of the mood a defined, precise structure, an invasion of the lane of our pretended equilibrium.

Tabula rasa yes, but feathery, oxygenated with algid protean beauty, in the midst of the circle of emotions that are only the tail end of a mental palace that verbalises instincts, radiant days in the half-light and the fatigue of manifesting the talent of these compositions that attract the pulse towards the fatigue of containing them all.

More intimate, less dreamy (it sounds like an oxymoron, a blasphemy, but sooner or later you'll realise it's not so...), raw with the melancholy that underlines the power of these drops that, even when they fall hard, know how to use noise like a feather soaked in sunshine...

Elizabeth Heaton and Rowan Burn are two fairies who ignore the success, the poses, the public needs that only sow dispersion. They collect the breaths, the thoughts, and, with a kitchen whisk, condense their intimate quest into a golden helmet where everything is amalgamated and placed in the fridge of the heart. They have grown, they have generated sound pills not as children but as brushes and colours to be thrown into the wind. 

Now, more than ever, they live on continuous play, a coming and going from the core of forms, a very careful use of branches, in which post-rock, progressive and shoegaze are glued to the material of mental penetration, making the choice that each scalpel is capable of not stopping on the first layer of the skin of these songs. This explains the intensity, the restrained explosion to generate, rather, a more silent din, circumstantiated by the need to use notes as glue, as paper on which to write an irrepressible DNA: that of description. 

The willingness to call in Michael Hamilton, also a multi-instrumentalist and producer, allowed for the extension of the songwriting phase, as if indeed one more member would make this ‘concert’ that is Cold Waves Divide Us an unrepeatable exchange of gifts, in a period not of grace but of real capacity in search of a permanent fixative, to allow this live performance to never end.

One finds oneself in the vision of the world, in the lock of a door where each of us lives the secrecy of our existence, in the dump of faded dreams, of wills devoid of bite, and then anaesthetises joy in order to make it come to life with these small notes that, set, become boulders full of mountain flowers, in flight, enchanted and enchanting, without end.

The three of them are the funnel into which every tear falls, every intimate emotional resurrection, because they know how to dig into the vicissitudes of the individual expressions of musical notes, to correct contemporary music's unwise choice to seek success. True art always has its back to the audience...

Wedges, firecrackers, kisses with blue lipstick and demijohns of wine enter these songs to inebriate, stun, move and make listening a swirling inferno.

Ethereal music that warms the fire buried in the veins, adrenalin that comes out of the anaesthesia of mediocre listening, continuous elaborations on the structures that make every second of listening a millennium in the beats of our heart. Stunned angels, wandering among the cradles of needs not granted to us, reproducing enchantments and suggestions, drawing impetuses and reflections, together.

The movements, the twists, the conduction of the guitars are linked to the strings, the rarely powerful drumming, the bass that measures the shape condition of the dreams and supports them, and then to the expression of the uvula, on which sooner or later the Old Scribe will write a book.

But, unlike all my colleagues, I would like to stress that the musical parts are the real oil well, the vocal fuse, an embrace that allows each of the band members to explore a different universe. Of course, hers is the best in the last twenty years and her singing is simply devastatingly beautiful, irrepressible, the mother of every shuddering tear, a sensory spring that smears the face with liquids in continuous dispersion.

But she is not alone. Not only does she conquer and penetrate. One must have the courage to affirm that the perfect music suggests the perfect voice to stand on the same stage and bring listening where mediocrity has no access.

Art as a cloud waiting for thunder, for thunder waiting to sleep on a cloud, with a piano in the middle and strings spelling out outdated vowels, in the fantasy of an unlikely encounter. 

It is not Dream Pop, it is not Gothic, it is not a genre: what it is remains relegated to mystery. Films of films that never existed, painted in a workshop far from accessibility, allow the coldness contained in the album's title to tremble, to become a frenetic fragment, to evaporate pretensions and to disturb the soul. Undeterred, stuck in the magic pill of the unknown, this path of notes creates prog symphonies in a veiled way, diving into the mode of the goniometer and ink: defining, without smearing.

The grace, the feather that does not accelerate too much, the rocking of the voice between scratches and clusters of foils, introduce the thought to a location never considered before: the confusion of bewilderment before this unbearable beauty.

The strings, the synths, not only hover but point their feet, claim space and penetrate the eardrums with that sweetness that disarms and overpowers. Combined with the voice and guitar, they become lead with petals in plain sight....

Avant-garde, originality are grounds that belong to the memory (in the musical sphere certainly), but how beautiful is it to note the exception that lives in this swarm, in this beehive, in this roar of gentle strings?

Evocative harmonies, flashes of notes, syncopated bass strokes, almost invisible patterns, and then the flash, in a sweat of blood that sets off from Scotland to make a beautiful journey into our obscene ignorance. Here, then, is this record becoming the master of a perverse joy.

The sound is omnivorous, it devours the walls of the pentagram, and perfectly describes how much everything derives from classical music, from that pot that still boils the water of musical art, without hesitation. The stillness disturbs those who experience tidal waves, it disrupts them and makes them angry. The three of them, young marmots in the forest of pain, search for the leaves to make the intuitive films branch out, crossing the boundaries of the conscious, immobilising the unconscious, and then establishing the shifts of the thoughts that arise, chase each other, and bring us down.

‘Cold waves divide us’: this is the translation of the title, a deception, a truth, a clarification, a perfect ploy to focus attention on relationships, with oneself, with others, to create an emotional jungle in the Arctic pole. The cold does not melt but only chooses the best temperature to preserve and, therefore, to remember. And the album reminds us of how the ancient fragrances need a reminder, like a mental cocaine to pull up, in our foggy brains.

Crying is a gift that the soul offers to your belief that you are stronger than anything. When the songs change your mood and the flow of thoughts becomes intolerable and ungovernable, then you realise that you are faced with an enormous power, not equal to your own, and therefore you come to terms with an enormous fragility. In this case positive and capable of making you a chick in its first day of life. These are unknown information, not tracks, pills of atoms in a square sphere, not tracks, gaseous flames in which to faint from the beauty and certainly not from their toxicity, but never tracks: it would be diminishing their value if we thought that. 

Midas Fall arrive in the hemisphere of emptiness: their sublime talent (not touchable, but only usable as long as one does not enter their gaseous dumps), descends into the perimeter of perfection with the only true Masterpiece of the last ten musical years.

There is a known and an unknown that together tear apart the certain and program it for a dutiful escape.

If we really want to consider it an album, let's just say that the multitude of forms of communication here are assembled and amalgamated to leave one utterly astounded. 

We move the light, behind our backs, and enter these floral craters, one by one...

Song by Song

1 - In the Morning We'll Be Someone Else

The beginning of this masterpiece is an investigation of stylistic form, a hint of nerves, a beating in the dust: Dry, melodic, nuclear in the effect of a collapsing intimacy, it uses the atmosphere of a dream, with the slowness and drumming attempting to advance the brushes of these distant fragrances, while the vocals take the electronic part of the piece by the hand, in the chemical outpost of an ethereal manifestation of light that leaves, abandoning all comparisons with what the band had written before. Overture and torture: one immediately weeps with the shoegaze guitar lifting notes to a distant sky...

2 - I am Wrong

The rhythm enters like the spectacle of a decadent forest in the process of containment: the perspective plan is that of a race, instead, although the musical cadence suggests a tribal dance, sadness and melancholy govern these pills of ancient guitars, very close to the early eighties, when little was needed to say a lot... The coda of the song is an electric circuit of clouds and drumming that hypnotises the song form, to grant the return of Elizabeth who does justice with her vocal discipline.

Different musical genres mute here, cross over and then become spectators in the final seconds where everything becomes synthesis...

3 - Salt

Memories of Evaporate return, reminding us of their last album from five years ago: there are compositions born to be a racket inside the six-string, supported by ethereal vocals, almost demure strings and orchestration that passes from ancient to modern with ease, only to become a pill of the most profound post-rock sadness and misery...

4 - In This Avalanche

Elizabeth's lyrics are stings, the music the fabric over which she sweeps in her contemplation gentle and kind only in appearance. A music box, in the form of a loop, paves the way for a harmony that centrings the energies, then explores the sky when the voice closes in silence. Piano and synth make love to a guitar that smells of Dream Pop but is free of conditioning. And indeed she does not miss her appointment with an imaginative attitude that takes her elsewhere. A lullaby can also be a wicked but enchanting arrow...

5 - Point of Diminishing Return

The only instrumental track is instead an atypical Gregorian chorus: everything is elevated to prayer, modern, atheistic, disengaged from faith, to become a post-rock birth close to that of Leech, to give the notes a space on which to insert inserts and textures that conclude the path by inventing the rule of the sudden limit. Glacial, austere, with a sublime sadness, the song acts as a perfect bridge between the first part of the album (attentive and thoughtful) and the second (gasping with a silk jacket in her hair), in order to stun the senses and capture attention: where a splendid voice is absent, there can be music that reproduces the effect, and this happens, inexorably, on this occasion...

6 - Monsters

Once upon a time there was Mazzy Star. Low. And a plethora of bands looking for the voice to perfect the artistic path. It happens, in this case, that two parallel universes meet. In the meantime, everything becomes a harrowing episode in which guitars look at the thin horizon between post-rock and shoegaze to become the progressive form of an ancient rock. And Elizabeth's kills all reluctance, to the point of fogging the glass with sobs from the snare drum and guitars in gaseous exploration...

7 - Atrophy

Where the sky ends, Atrophy lives: the sense of death amidst the bubbling of a song that rapes the heart and a guitar footstep that advances to become an ethereal, rarefied dream, convince us that this episode is so capable of destroying defences that the soul concentrates on the heartbreaking farewell of forces in free fall. A mantra that leaves burrs in the morning of a resounding insight: drawing for real the place where it all ends...

8 - Cold Waves Divide Us

The synthesis, the prophecy, the passionate flurry of a day in which contact is made with discomfort: this track is the safe of the band's new impetus, the probe that from slowness and conceptual precision comes out widening the rhythm, the visual perimeter, and makes the loop and the delay of the guitar shine to concentrate a musical truth that is indisputable for them, which is that of never repeating a rainy day without allowing themselves multiple inputs. Here then, the musical genres present here are diverse but, given the invoice of the composition, they hide their noses, leaving only their arms to be glimpsed...

9 - Little Wooden Boxes

Nature becomes a musical note.

The breath of instruments a blink of an eye.

Words like swans in a polluted flight.

What lives on in the album's penultimate composition is a gentle and clean reinforcement of the stylistic code of this incredible journey: dilations, incursions of single chords and the slowness of the progression so close to Post-Rock without, however, entering into those parameters. The voice, with its evocative mode, explores the progression without following its shadows, and it is pure miracle of a perfect combo...

10 - Mute

The incipit is cavernous, a wreck on a nervous wave, a malaise that relies on the voice to create a short roar, not dry, but perpetually constricted by the few notes of a bewitched piano full of evil beauty, to prevent the whole from dying.

It needs no refrains, no boorish gimmicks as it is entirely similar to the typical mode of Nick Cave's old Bad Seeds: give the bass the sceptre and then invest in the fluorescent mantle of a musical apparatus to back it up. 

To arrive at the dilation, the ductility of Shoegaze that governs mystery and Post-Rock, here in the guise of a restraining magician.

Sacred, virgin, nefarious in the positive sense, the song closes this masterpiece like a drop of dew: let beauty be celebrated amidst the rose garden of endless tears...

Alex Dematteis (Vecchio Scriba - Old Writer)

Musicshockworld

Salford

7th December 2024

https://open.spotify.com/album/7HE5PoausnMjJAoco3miw2?si=PhDhAlwiQtGZEgr23y6j1Q

https://www.midasfall.com/home