My Review: The Neuro Farm - Ghosts

 

The Neuro Farm - Ghosts

Rebekah Feng - Vocals, electric violin

Brian S. Wolff - Vocals and guitar

Tim Phillips - Keyboards and sound-design

DreamrD - Drums and percussion

Absence, distance and lack can't be touched but they (The Neuro Farm) do it perfectly, reaching out to shake the soul.

Which in this case is unquestionably lost.

And to simplify it, one could call the characters that gravitate within these seven tracks by the American band ghosts.

Delirious, suffocating beauty, in conjunction with magnetic arrows capable of generating a sense of imprisonment and liberation, in the play of an oxymoron that makes the nourishment of emotional paralysis worthwhile.

The influences, evident and viral, lead us into the paths of artists such as Chelsea Wolfe, Midnight Juggernauts, Tori Amos, Nine Inch Nails, Pj Harvey, Cranes and many others, but with this quartet what stuns is not the evocation but the invasion, the one that obtunds, unveils, emphasises the right to probe multiple aptitudes that you will not find in the list of artists mentioned above. In the emotional chaos, beauty emerges as a survivor whose interlocutor is a ghost and her blood brothers, in an imperfect place to be afraid of not keeping the balance, in which stability is an impediment. Music for the psyche, for streams that lose consciousness and burble, humming continuously like a sweet poem full of sinister tricks and textures: the sweetness seems to be feigned, only to reveal itself instead as the basis of a generous fruit that, through the choice of contrasting musical genres, generates the liberation for a sweaty but satisfied madness. Time, in these seven compositions, disturbs, provokes, soothes, disinfects and plants the flag at the crossroads of spiritual ascents and descents that have no end...

Everything is thrown on the contours of a mirror, cosy, untiring, to give the multiplicity of hooks between electric violin and crusted guitar a sense of annexation that is formidable.

The quirks become clothes, the notes a primary afflatus, the rhythm changes the square that disorientates and rages, in the corollary of a series of familiar tremors. In this, All About Eve are precisely the parents of such inclinations. 

Released on the 10th of June 2014, this sublime work displays the scratches of a darkwave devoid of self-quotations, with the gloom reaching into alternative, art pop and early 70s scratchy cabaret. The vocal harmonies (very different between Rebekah's and Brian's), are dark but mystical, mysterious, like plungers on a pentagram that sounds like a ball of silk on a dark night.

The epicness is always controlled until the refrains offer a chance for majestic grandeur, yet the elegant fairies do not open their lips much, as if the sumptuousness could be perceived rather than heard...

One has the feeling that compared to the debut work, Ghosts, it is a slow missive that, while scratching a lot, retains the grace and respect for their own future. But, clearly, speaking of ghosts (better, I repeat, of lost souls), this project is a didactic system to make memory, fear, experience a lifesaver that can stop generating confrontations.

Pills, gratings, fans, stings in amniotic liquids often inebriated and never reassured: this is the real value of such complexities. Drama is an alarm and not a capricious defence: just think of how all the guitars align themselves with both rhythm and circular melodic expansion, while the violin becomes the summary of a hive of young sirens...

The loss of orientation, in the presence of ghosts, in the magnetic magma of these compositions, presents us with the aforementioned spirits as predecessors and witnesses of witticisms and strategies, because each song is a butterfly that with its flight carries away a room of one's own mind...

Let us now visit, slowly and devotedly, all these seven magnetic footsteps...

Song by Song

1 - Black Wings

The opening is a condensation of atmospheres, with the guitar riff folded in on itself, in a mastodontic darkness, and Rebekah's singing that takes us to the first ep by the Cranes and that singer capable of making the sky a continuous thunderstorm...

The stylistic code is given by the apparent darkwave mobility, but the violin solo, a diamond of malignant beauty, summons us to the theatre for cabaret spurts and medieval monologues. Austere, violent, a weed to open the consciousness of unpleasant encounters...

2 - Paralysis

Often hypnosis is a magnet without control, through beats that seem to insist and combine with subtle textures of warped and deforming synths, with the melancholic violin that clings to Brian's voice, but with the crazy surprise of a long wait before the second verse: the main structure remains, but the voice seems to disappear and the guitars and violin dance in the recesses of the semi-darkness. Then the reset and the chanting becomes an orgasmic go-ahead that makes the paralysis of the title the only discipline in front of the whole...

A complex, liturgical track, permeated especially in the finale with a tension that dries the breath…

3 - Skeletons

A post-punk lullaby the likes of which has not been heard in quite some time, with, in the refrain, a sonic mixture that prevents the rhythm from being pleasant, a spectacular and intentional disturbance to then resume with the arpeggio, the singing and the preceding drumming that linearity that perhaps creates less of a problem for the listener. Everything is governed by melancholic desires, with programmed flights given by arpeggios and bass altos to make the track a suppository that wants to lean on the nightmare that lives in its grooves. The violin goes to make the words die and the tears seem like a liberating thank you...

4 - Submission

The hypnosis of Trip-Hop in search of furtive gothic dives settles in the excited drumming and in a stuttering guitar between echoes and distortions calibrated with drops of wah wah. 

Brian in the refrain touches the borders of two historical stalagmites of the 70s: John Foxx and Stan Ridgway and it is hypnosis and weeping, unquestionable and inevitable...

The lyrics emphasise and the music escapes, the singing perceives the whole and the song becomes the funeral of every hoped-for calm...

5 - Falling

In the early 2000s, gothic ballads involved arpeggios and the inclusion of small solos to weld the belief that even this could reach the masses. These guys, on the other hand, distribute novelty and annoyance with syncopated drumming that sweeps the cards, while in the finale the singing recedes, is almost hidden, and a guitar full of water drowns out the sound only to return with a lacerating circular hiss

6 - Underground

The penultimate episode is the summa of a slow and scratchy ordeal, with the lyrics recounting the obscure everyday life, giving inspiration the role of terrifying. Then its slow tension looks defiantly at the sky while the guitar, robotic but never static, takes on the burden of thickening the drama.

7 - Resolution

The end sees the expulsion of the voices from the stage, entrusting to the plots, interwoven with suspense and melancholy, the task of immersing us in a strangely clean, positive air, with the synths that suspend the path previously taken to exalt the disappearance of the ghosts... An ending that smells of an epilogue in which the most unpleasant feelings rest and the dream of a more serene access to the future can at least have a chance...

Epic, sinuous, it creeps in like a weed whose possession cannot but generate a bloody pleasure...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

15th June 2025

https://theneurofarm.bandcamp.com/album/ghosts