My Review: Pink Turns Blue - Black Swan

 

Pink Turns Blue - Black Swan

It was the 1980s, Leeds was generating an enormous rational and emotional flow, which had been given the appellation Post-punk, and everything had become core, guts, bark, feather, crowbar, to contaminate first European soil and then world soil.

The musical city par excellence watched, studied, measured first and then distanced itself, knowing how to quickly become a dark beacon, in the vicinity of a gothic and literary involvement with no possibility of contradiction.

Berlin created an infinite grey of which two musicians were paladins, but without any desire to be its pivotal and most prominent exponents.

Pink Turns Blue are an almost religious institution for that Germany that knows how to love its children, sure that the duo (now become a trio), does not betray, holds in its talented arms miles of art that does not wish to be exposed to the light of the media, of people, of anyone, for that simplicity, modesty, Teutonic sense of work that does not seek applause, for a non-strategy that knows how to float among the shadows taking just enough oxygen to generate sound pills that smell of anaesthesia, in the apotheosis of whispers and suggestions that are often really practically invisible.

Mic Jogwer, Paul Richter and Luca Sammuri have reappeared, like splintered prey, like sonic cylinders in a day's work, with a suitcase full of history, geography, sociology and a diet that invites modern egoism to melt away. They explore the nooks and crannies of post-punk with increasing meticulousness, diminishing still further the imagination, the illuminations, silencing instinct and working, rather, on a few lines, on wide loops from which to draw the vitality they and we need. 

A mental orchestra invites the notes to be discreet, transparent, fierce, like ancient cannibals who know how to bite ankles: melancholy is not left alone, but accompanied by a vision that pushes for a human unity worthy of the philosophical school of the 1900s that, as chance would have it, came from another German city.

A record like a journey with a burlap sack on their shoulders, to harvest, to sow, to wait, to smile, never to make people cry, because that is not their job.

The claustrophobia of modern living enters the fog of obedient guitars, of dry drumming devoted to simplicity, with the bass remaining fond of Red Lorry Yellow Lorry for a carpet that, thanks to veiled keyboards, homogenises the intensity and erects it to the role of mental traffic light.

Uncomplicated but deep riffs sink in, Mic's singing is more and more a skeleton with wispy palpitations, irresistible and provocative, with his unmistakable accent to make us smile as a tender embrace. His words, however, are blades and thorns that never return to his throat....

The sound is an obscure contraption, a mystery that seeks the breadth of pop, coughing, taking from that aforementioned Leeds the poisonous particles of its factories, for a hypothetical bridge to Berlin, in order to sow an invisible territory of death and mourning.

The trio does not try to be convincing with songs full of variations, tricks and accesses full of excesses: they prefer a desert mode, with sun and moon, heat and cold and pain and little joy all packed into a few chords, achieving the result of being more convincing and able to become a mirror that is never tarnished.

The magic of the twelve compositions is all in the direction, in these gentle bullets with their lapels turned up, along with the perfect dose of poignant affirmations, in which the relationship between the self and others seems to be an almost silent film, to generate oscillating projections full of sweat and coughing: it incites fear, the right amount of unease and, if you pay attention, everything is perfectly positioned between the cold and detached mechanism and a generous emotional explosion.

The production gives the right continuity to the previous one, and in it it is very clear that the almost forty-year career offers us people who are very distant from their beginnings, but with the same propensity to make music a serious job and not a playground without specific care.

Fascination with them becomes the gymnasium of an intelligence that cannot have so many followers: they have always been ahead of the game and these tracks demonstrate, thanks to a vertical and never pompous framework, that they leave aside the ambitions of success, which is for them a useless event. This is understandable because they are eleven sentences, where nobody gets on their train but, really, believe me, it is preferable for the masses to avoid its tracks.

Many current bands grew up thanks to PTB and then preferred to stuff the richness of spirit with aesthetic beauty, the sterile kind.

Pink, blue and black: three colours placed in a row, like a logical cloak of belonging, with skin, sky and death wisely represented in these grooves.

All we can do is to bring our ears close to it and swallow joy and fear, as the only intelligent act...

Song by Song

1 - Follow Me

Crackling synths and melancholic guitar christen the album. And then a soul questions itself, searching for answers in the sky and in people for a song full of pain in transit, with the skin trembling in this electronic riff son of Kraftwerk and in the guitars full of the very dark light of this band in their early days. An invitation that is the muted response of those who adore this first track, as a good and just thing...

2 - Can't Do Without You

Here is the pop song, or rather, one that tries to enter a place the band never wanted to be a part of. It becomes a single, a glue generator between that genre and electronic indie, with the rhythm taking the form of a simple mantra on which the synth line rests.

3 - Dancing With Ghosts

Try to imagine a point in the sky where the guitar trajectories of The Mission and Red Lorry Yellow Lorry intersect. There it is: from here, a rainbow of liquid beauty with invocations, desires towards an essential metric that is typical for the Berliners. And it is amazement and joy in mixed dance.

4 - Fighting for the Right Side

How to translate claustrophobia into a calendar where the candles are extinguished and pushed by this bass to bring the voice to the walls wallpapered with a deep need for justice. Guitars absorbing glam, almost hard rock, brief moments and then it's decadent poetry to lead this piece to their podium whose space we can only wish to share.

5 - Why Can't We Just Move On

We find ourselves in the dark electro zone of Slow Readers Club, with Manchester calling to Berlin. A sonic grace is invaded by a paralysing sadness. And it's mantra like a genetic epilepsy spreading salt and honey....

6 - Black Swan (But I Know There's More to Life)

We are at the highest point, where the God of Flight loses his breath. An honest cry is born on these black-and-white keys, on the grey voice, on this swan that seems to fly between the walls of a lyric perfectly adjacent to the frustrations of a guitar that tries to scratch our breath, for a sensation of endless hypnotic damnation...

7 - Like We All Do

Every lightning bolt has an invisible opposing force: that's what happens in this sudden rush that reminds us of Belfegore, with that same impetus that chills the night. The crescendo of rock guitars (in the vicinity of Sonic Temple's Cult) induces us to a joy whose address we do not know but, like butterflies drugged with life, we will get there in a daze. And the mistakes of existence find a perfect bowl in this little urban jewel...

8 - Friday Night Out 

Deceptive chords precede a smoky, poisonous spit, with the memory of the first singles of Fields of the Nephilim (especially in the bass line and the ‘simplicity’ of the guitar), making this song the epitome of the evolution of the band from the German capital: everything here is poetic vision, in chiaroscuro, in a sinful state of warning for what could happen to us...

9 - Please Don't Ask Me Why 

Never oblivious to their debut album, the three of them unleash songs like drops of water full of memory. The track is a temporal embrace, a kiss to the temples and an invitation to read the life of feelings carefully. The voice becomes exhilarating, propaedeutic, recitative over the chilling vibrations of a six-string in a trance-like state...

10 - I Can Read Your Name in the Stars

Third episode in which the piano takes the stage: it is only the springboard for a series of words that know how to be a gentle sling, waiting for the thunder. Which arrives, gently, as if the whole thing were the basis of an unusual ballad, for a baritone approach forgotten in order to favour the inclination of a series of unexpected smiles...

11 - Stay for the Night

Glory must have a crown for all to see. One always closes a path with the infinite illuminating the past. That's what this song does, a sumptuous and perfect synthesis of a delinquent act of beauty that makes the congenital loop developed in three precise phases the spectacular amphitheatre of a sound reef that makes you weep in spite of everything. A dreamlike density, a sequence of references rendered subtle and almost hidden, but in these few notes chaos happens, its opposite, in an undulating alternation, with the heart of the piece showing the glimmers of its complexity when the drumming and synths fail. It is at that very moment that you realise the landslide zones that can produce this crazy track that closes the album and opens the heart towards a paranoid and irresistible desire to surround oneself with this magnetic addiction…

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

12 March 2025

https://pinkturnsblue.bandcamp.com/album/black-swan

ORDEN-RECORDS BERLIN - MusicBrainz

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