My Review: The Black Veils - Gaslight

“Sometimes, in the morning, with the sun shining, it's hard to believe that night has passed.”

From Gaslight, a film by George Cukor

Territories often seem like a slingshot waiting to be fired, a discreet and slow volcano seeking eternal possession. In this, cinema has provided nourishment, wings, chains, pins and much more, ultimately creating an umbilical cord with music. On this occasion, for the title of the Bologna band's fourth album, it is the film itself that stimulates and protects these ten majestic compositions.

However, we also find ourselves in Frankfurt's Ratinger Hof disco, surrounded by dancing souls, crucified by paranoia, like robotised and stale existences, in the middle of the 1980s, to breathe life into a funeral and its party. Because in this work, death becomes a blessing of unconsidered fortunes, a mandatory, gentle and certainly accommodating pass.

A work that demonstrates methodical organisation and, while maintaining the acidity of post-punk trajectories, in this episode the alteration, perfect and sublime, is offered by an electronic nature in its many forms and obstinacy, a dark electro that blends with fascinating synthwave sparks and clusters of semantic waves typical of the most veiled shoegaze.

An album like a mystical and painful tide, with primitive purities in gentle processions, bringing transistors and amplifiers back to the stage of the most ancient acting. Ringing timbres, mantras and loops that smell each other, lyrics like coal about to turn into sacred ashes.

It is not sight but hearing that is subjugated by these textures, long trained blades, but rather the imagination, which here is expanded and transported like a dancing swing, back and forth in time.

Like warbling birds, songs expatriate the now bored sense of spiritual consensus, creating sudden debates within our consciousness.

Dance becomes a pagan ritual authorised by today's rudeness, by ancient stories synthesised here and thrown into watts and vocal cords, like an orderly data transmission.

We often find ourselves remembering the Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW) and encountering the pleasure of sarcasm, that blissfully macabre, cruel but sincere sarcasm.

The range of colours, sounds, associations and programming are part of a profound maturity shown by these three musicians who know how to explode, explore, throw the mud of mediocrity and turn it into continuous mental percussion.

Openings and closings in relation to their ten-year past show eclecticism, clarity of theatrical visions, and stances designed to consciously stun any certainty. And this is where their masterpiece fully manifests itself.

Music that makes the mind race, that elevates it and sinks it without remorse. They take risks, gamble and don't care, like soldiers loyal only to artistic obedience that recognises no other powers.

All this is nothing more than a black and white rainbow from which nails and confetti rain down, connecting a set of mental electrical cables in constant descent.

The themes of Gregor Samsa's lyrics seem to support the sonic weeds, hammering home the transition between night and day, between dreams and daily nightmares, making Mario d'Anelli and his guitars and synths the muse for Filippo Scalzo's wild and ruthless bass.

Listening to this album is like a marathon in which you break down, lose fluids and drain yourself of all banality.

Severe, ruthless, with notable references to those fertile years that the three did not hesitate to explore, adding their own sweet and dark pessimism.

As if Poe became a musical trinity, without opponents...

Fear as a resource, pain as an opportunity to change the guise of thoughts, in an energetic exchange of fluids, to make the dances passionate and bring souls to a refuge that knows no lock...

Yes, everything enters and everything leaves this maritime, celestial place, a sublime condensation of nebulous enrichments, clearly in excellent shape to learn about our submission.

Songs like Rhodolia rosea, so as not to feel the fatigue of thoughts, to give the mood a ventriloquist's illusion.

Ancient iconicity, oscillatory movements and an empathetic propensity to use synths like glass brushes, often filling them with fascinating harmonic movements, are highlighted, yet the whole becomes illusory and therefore sublime.

The notes make the air a parking lot muffled by warlike, almost obscene noises, exuberant certainly, but above all, exquisite crystalline forms, capable of filling words, emptying them, repeating the exercise with notes, and everything seems to go too fast, giving the new listener the chance to experience infinite repetitions.

The certainty that these ten tracks are a beacon of the future immersed in the sea of music that was, as if the gaze of the lioness mother became a carpet on which to run the future, becomes obscene and astonishing...

A work unsuitable for the majority of empty souls: for them, the invitation is to move on.

For the others: a long orgasmic plot awaits the liturgy of deepening.

The many changes in trajectory, rhythm and grafting in each individual track perfectly express the meticulous study of these musicians, artists who, through this work, demonstrate that there is no origin but rather a residence.

Which is above all mental.

Lunar, nocturnal images, in which disturbing rays of sunlight are shown as clues, evidence, summaries, but never as hypotheses, making perfection human and achievable.

When post-punk DNA opens its arms to electronica, we see EBM pills embedded in the liquids of sinuous dark electro, filling the banks and emptying doubts.

The singing often seeks reflection, crash, metrical form and decadent poetry, moving from poetic textures to a high register redolent of screams and vomit, creating an undeniable and immense benefit for our listening.

Painful, pregnant with claws, a scout of the soul, this vocal approach seems to bring the cabaret of the Virgin Prunes to the Po Valley, like a eager electroshock.

The duo that takes on the responsibility of being a glass slingshot breathes in the balmy German currents, like those of Killing Joke, exhaling brutality and impetus, like moral obedience to darkness, brought to light here with these vertical zigzags, without ever giving the impression that fatigue can cage them.

The Old Scribe is impressed by this pressing form of lament, never expressed, never in the form of direct invective in the lyrics but conveyed by the soundscapes. The words are black seeds, ploughs, poles, black velvet slaps: the pain only comes at the end...

In conclusion: this black and white rainbow does not need our eyes, it only needs the bad mood of our hypocritical existence to bury us with its angelic black beauty...

Song by Song

1 - Nyctalopia

The ferocity of Abwärts, a sadly little-known German band, enters the bass that assaults the ears, with the guitar becoming an echo of the heart and the voice a gesture in which genocide is surrounded by the terrifying and pulsating flashes of consciousness. Laden with post-punk torment, the piece makes rhythm and obsession compatible...

2 - Comedy of Menace

We move to the Markthalle in Hamburg: the rhythm and neurotic poetry of the bass pass through the tackles of an abrasive guitar and the vocals become the sponge of enormous eyes that know how to lie perfectly. The guitar solo does credit to Bill Duffy and the circle with the 1980s breaks perfectly.

3 - Gaslight

Coldwave movements invade the ballroom, cinema inhabits the pupils and the salvation of the soul passes through sin. The music presents itself as a Bristol immersed in fog, between EBM paintings and hallucinatory spaces of dark electro in search of loops and chains...

4 - Buster Keaton

We fall: into the lyrics, into the rhythm, into the explosive elegance of nervous frames, of paranoia in a row, and the flashes of Cabaret Voltaire return to inhabit the band's planet, with the chorus making us understand the importance of the Psychedelic Furs. But everything is electric, eclectic, a visual poem that runs breathlessly...

5 - The Spectral Link

Not a filler track, nor a bridge, but rather the harmonious combination of three souls experiencing the roar of the sky, bringing Alan Parson and Kraftwerk into contact, but not in the last century...

The future can only be a disaster, and this track represents it in advance, with lashes, through a synth that takes on the role of narrating it, shamelessly, making fear visible (at the beginning), then creating whirlpools and colours that turn from pink to black. The voice is silent, for an apparent silence, because everything becomes noise...

6 - Black Kittens Against Privilege

The emotion, frenzy and enthusiasm of death find the perfect outfit, the right story, the ghost that reveals itself laughing among the grooves, looking at the world in black and white. And so does the music: a funeral march that recounts our modest form of free will. Sounds and vocal cords become an equation and guitars mix with synths to line the doubt. Disconcerting beauty to surrender to...

7 - Tightrope Walker

The human void, of existence, is recounted here, like an X-ray, like a blood test whose results we will certainly not accept. Violent, dark, psychedelic in mood, the song is a generous lash to the heart, as the brain has already shown its demise... Bringing the Bat Cave back to life with a single blowtorch is truly a miracle, a dark one...

8 - Piggies

D.A.F. rent a dream: to come back to life for a few minutes, and they do so in this delirium, accepting guitars full of shoegaze liquids and blessing the scratches of a vocal metric that blends with the voluptuous thrust of incredible, divining, breathless steps...

9 - Have You Seen Bunny Lake?

We mourn rotten hearts, visit mocking laughter and dance like robots without the weight of the soul, in the EBM vortex that seeks marriage with ascending guitar textures...

10 - Seed of Revolt

Louis Wain, a cat, a black dress, and the elegant closing track probably show us the sonic resistance of the Bolognese trio: the melodic research is reserved for the last track, with doubled voices, Stop and go and harmonic layers with double-breasted, to come out towards a funeral party that makes us all happily depressed...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

14th November 2025

Gregor Samsa - Vocals

Filippo Scalzo - Bass

Mario d'Anelli - Guitars, Synth

Icy Cold Records

Metaversus

https://open.spotify.com/album/2yHLnynl3gYRrYn8gVuQNz?si=zY2YFc2CTWivf6FdAlSZvQ