My review: Edna Frau - Slow, Be Gentle I Am Virgin

 

Edna Frau - Slow, Be Gentle I Am Virgin

In the chaos of unease, there is a silent counterpart and a planned friction, which unleashes the acrid taste of anger, like a stubbornness that must be exposed, already crucified.

The band Edna Frau amazes once again, for a very unusual fact that must necessarily be explained.

The debut album of almost five years ago, My Ego is Bigger than Yours, seemed like a second if not even a third work, due to its elaborate propensity to move within multiple zones, as if in search of a musical airport where the flood of ideas could be exposed, presenting the pleasing difficulty of accommodating great songs but perhaps structured as an act of presence. Not a flaw, for goodness sake, yet in its incandescent beauty one finds it hard to linger.

Instead, one now seems to be at a crossroads to be crossed with red and black, without delay, with that youthful impetuosity that wants to stir the waters of heaven.

It is a robust, red-hot, passionate and suffered project, but the pain is not a lament but a benevolent form of integration with the developments of dreams, nightmares, ascertainments, ironic attestations and the guise of a reduced musical mixture that is nevertheless more capable of insinuating itself into the reception of a listening that is educated to consider the transformative bases of a post-punk connected in a diminished way to the electro-dark that was very present in the debut tracks.

One thus finds oneself in the wandering journey between Germany, the US and England, like a lamp that blinds one to see only what is essential.

It is astonishing how Vins Baruzzi's lyrics and Andrea Fioravanti's music are able to exert the need to look towards the back of time and place.

The points of contact take us back to the exciting interlude of the German Stimmen der Stille, as well as to Actifed, Brotherhood of Pagans and the early Sound. 

But it is only a feint, an excuse, because the boys use music as rockets, reflexive, to strike at the stagnant inactivity of the brain.

This explains the guitars' choice to be searing acid that fires notes like a bayonet, and the vocals that in their theatricality rediscover Killing Joke for the time to create stories in which the captivating nastiness is only the beginning of a fire.

Music like an inescapable shave, with the hot backbone of events filled with saturated disappointments. The band sounds like weathered ivy, carrying its vitamin load in the frustrations of drumming that doesn't make us dance but rather rummage through our need to take melancholy elsewhere. The bass is a factory of black oil, which retains the flavour of the eighties, while the guitar throws us into the silence of fingers that speak a language that leads us to welcome a cultured soul in front of a glowing, flickering mental palace.

The voice and the mode of singing is a bouncing labyrinth, fleshing us out and bringing us back to attention, harbouring a sweetness elaborated by lyrics that, at last, sentence, and morality is exposed, as it should be.

For these reasons alone, this work should be mummified in our ears, developing, consciously, an inspirational and devoted thanks. Richness and din here clearly outnumber the six artistic creatures: the sensation is that of standing in the desert temple of a silence that raises its curtains, as each track has in its DNA a fertile sense of scrutiny, of disgust, manifesting an allergy to pop and taking, overbearingly and marvellously, the possibility of becoming hypnosis, in the perfect marriage between expressive art and listening.

A crazy record, for the abundance of rational ecstasy, for the inputs of memories that seem topical, for the theatricality of the musical set-up that brings together the electric dance and the refined mixture of mature rock in a grey coat and black lapel.

And when the stylings bring us back to Old Scribe's beloved Belfegore, we realise the coexistence, in a less exaggerated way than on the first album, of that magnetic wave of electro bands from the nineties that conquered dance halls but not the soul...

The record's American space is noticeable when points of contact with the Californian outfit Burning Image are found: and it is a smile of the chest as it rent scratches in the mind.

The energy of these six songs goes beyond beauty: the band's good taste to be less dispersive has marked the coexistence with the directness of their inner feeling.

Perfection has been achieved: having definitively abandoned the idea of an Italian musical space, the boys become pilots of an emotional space that is richly matched to the mental one: they flee, they make people flee, and then attend, in the tamed but elaborate song form, to their denial in the album's central crater, which we will analyse in a moment.

Significant, in the singing of almost all the refrains, is the juxtaposition, noble and relevant, with the expressive mode of Mark Burgess of the never forgotten The Chameleons.

But it's only a moment: Vins feeds on his imagination and marries Andrea's stratospheric textures by rummaging through his present. Here is yet another surprise, the impetuous ability to oust comparisons.

The musical notes are all words pregnant with urgency and method, the lyrics are sonic amplexes that hold patience by the lapels: a record that is in a hurry but is made for souls who know how to expand their calm...

Let us now turn to the approach of every chip in this work: make room and embrace this band because tears, the best ones, are never respectful…

Song by Song

1 - The Laundry Of Sins

‘If you need colour sin wash

or are you here for black or white?’

A searing run, basted by a venomous bass, leads us to hear a singing mode close to the Damned's good Vanian, while the corrosive guitar structure seems to hide. Instead it is a poison that matches the lyrics, a slap in the face of other people's existence, vulgarity and attitudinal filth. A majestic stage where well-structured dynamic ups and downs are wisely displayed and, in the absence of false elegance, the band veers towards total and devastating sincerity...

2 . Slow, Be Gentle I Am Virgin

‘It's time for my heart to know who you are’.

The syncopated rhythm might convince us that the set is about to slow down in intensity but, really, we witness its resounding opposite: the emphasis comes in the croaking bass, in the singing at a higher and only seemingly more melodic vocal register. The drumming is a set of shafts that serve to capture the exciting exposition of an ancient post-punk in search of revenge. The title, ironic and sarcastic, is just a drop of a rational ocean that, like a bandit, desires not approval but victims...

3 - See Me

“Taking off with your dreams

throwing away problems”.

We go to Germany, we vibe with a propensity for drama that teases patience, with the collapse of the wall of visibility, with the immense approach (which is never a didactic trick) of a refrain that embraces the black forest and the most meditative Dusseldorf. An anomalous ride of a guitar that sticks to noise and evasion in a spectral way...

4 - Again

'Again a bad choice

they will be tests of survival'

A jewel in the odour of Echo & The Bunnymen in its beginning, but then capable of pausing in the earthquake zones of a more current guitar style, with darkwave inclinations and reverb-soaked soul. The most exasperated episode of the entire project offers us the possibility of reflection through the perfect interplay of expressive swings. Epic, devastating, suffocating, the song is the cherry, in the process of hypnosis, that sends the food bolus into the channels of our mind.

Absolute gem with a finale that sounds like something out of Juju by the Banshees...

5 - Day One

'Describe all your feelings and fears'

And here the seeds of the first album reappear: the attention in the expressive mixture leads us to hidden but pulsating electronics, while the vocal-guitar duo creates an abundant inclination towards metaphysical abandon. A chase, an exasperating cry is accumulated in this simple but granitic sequence of chords. The sound thus becomes the soul of a mortality seeking refuge...

6 - Working On Myself

“Too many thoughts are running in circles inside me”.

The conclusion features a guest, a familiar element from his artistic journey in Sorry Heels.

The track is a cacophonous ballad, a slow cry, an excruciating dance step in the electronic echoes and vapours of an electric drumming that inhabits the impervious zones of slowness.

The feelings of the drama are exposed with snowy pop stigmata of despair, to deliver to the conclusion the respect given by inevitable reflections.

Radiophonic (obviously for circuits interested in the dissemination of a trained rage), magnetic and fluctuating, almost two steps away from a dreamlike aspect that never before presented itself.

An astonishment also offered by a rhythm that, when slowed down, allows us to hear the band's electro-dark variants.

When melancholy creates a smile, the atmosphere becomes a prolific graft for remembrance...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

20 June 2025

Vins Baruzzi - Vocals

Andrea Fioravanti - Guitar player and multi-instrumentalist

Federico Guardigni - Drums

Dario Foschini - Bass player

22 Dicembre Records

https://ednafrau.bandcamp.com/album/slow-be-gentle-i-am-virgin