My Review:
Diavol Sträin * Elegía del Olvido - Elegía del Horror
The Chilean city overlooking the harbour has enchanted the Italians so much that they have named it Valley of Paradise: where there is a conquest there is always a foolish kindness. It cannot be denied that those places are fascinating, but let the citizens decide on the name. It is from here that I start: from the name, the beginning of a life with so much of its destiny already determined right from the outset.
Here we are talking about the dark beauty, the one that does not deny the high expressive capacities of a combo devoted to splendour inside a cave where mysteries and intertwined affairs live on.
The two gothic corsairs create a more complex work than the previous Todi El Caos Abita Aquí, producing a magnetic box full of innovations and contaminations: they surprise themselves and make all this an achievement on our part.
Energy comes out of garages full of symbols and sacred dust, blessed by the God of pain, to give the dark sound a remarkable strength. Energy and melody become a necessity that explains events capable of producing shivers and bitter but wise observations. The bass sound is muffled, fraught with molecular fates capable of producing power and suggestions. The guitar is an intense den of hard-working mosquitoes, with the propensity to be enveloping, looking to the sky and the world's piles of rubble.
Compact songs, with marks of mental viruses out of control, with Deathrock stigmata that refuse to let themselves be imprisoned and know how to visit the range of possibilities they need. Intelligent, with an innate propensity to expand their feeling, they are Priestesses of the human mystery that elevates to the utmost power the sacred temple of the fragility of places, of seemingly joyless stories: real, concrete, we can only bless their aptitude for discovering the intercourses of fragility. Ethereal dreams for our ears to convert into precious files for our reasoning: each song on this album defines a loss from which to learn about reality.
With these gems, we experience a sonic menace which is made graceful by music that allows bows and prayers, like long days on the books of world history. On the curtain embalmed lights of the most seductive blackness contemplate ideas of aggregation with grey flashes, like crystals corrupted by a necessary and splendid carousel of complicity. A continuous outburst into pugnacious moors, with decisive steps, where nothing is shaky but where the dream sometimes leads to atmospheres layered and corrupted by the beauty of their ever-expanding feeling.
One is impressed by tracks that can reveal a dynamic propensity for non-violent but politely rude wickedness, just enough, in swinging games of austere and multifaceted seeds. They are attractive grains of wheat, lost in their own beauty, masters of versatility and candour. With the capacity for a sound derivative of Post-Punk and the Californian Deathrock zone, the band writes songs to give their vocals a chance to be flames of lethal gas, with the gothic redundancies of the 80s, evident but sweetened.
A visceral and magmatic sea, sonic paths that make beauty precise, a poem on the skin made steep by human events full of multiple incandescences. There is the life of stray souls, but not meaningless: the lungs, listening to these mental robberies, wriggle dreamily, with black confetti smiles, for a cathartic process with a light cap on the surface. One is compelled to pleasurable suffering, one senses and then understands that the two are enchanters of rituals that perform a beautifully crafted analytical process, one feeds on crumbs of shuttered happiness.
Mortality is applauded, despair and anxiety are companions of obligatory breaths and they know how to coexist, giving the impression that the night extinguishes the fear that is invited to emerge. They are steel songs, fragile sheets that have ghosts protecting them, to become rituals of perfect neurotic dances.
One lives in a necropolis that is more confused than ever, in a collapse of happiness that is no longer necessary: all this does not, however, make the album exclusive for black souls because it grants access to all those eager to investigate the irregular flows of difficulty, of the world in constant abandonment of the capacity to create serenity. Listening should be enforced by law: black coats to be worn, univocal, to wisely decree the reality of existences now close to the fall of hope.
We come out of the tombs not as zombies but as living beings who try to live again differently, noting the inevitable repetition of errors by which we are subjugated. Diavol Strâin is a real flame, a skein of spastic nerves necessary for the conscience that tries deception but fails with them.
They are witches with poisonous hands, quick, slow, succulent, conjugated to their hieroglyphic writing, emotional storms that sweep through to separate the fog from the fake rays that invade the streets. Chile here finds precise apostles in wanting their expressive autonomy, where elegance marries anger with crooked, decadent, sublime smiles.
They are black-clad gangsters, ancient, groping, but not devoid of consciences that stir the limbs of the mind, like violently suspended peristalsis: to listen to this beam of darkness is to become aware of the traffic of pain that spreads in the strings of their hearts.
They are vampires facing the moon, scorching souls who penetrate with an album that grates the wind and sweeps away confusions: methodical, precise, alienating, abundant in their sonic mantras, queens of the realm of dissatisfaction, they make their songs like loaves of bread without crumb. The taste is bitter, like certain dreams, opening the funereal skies of the night zone in search of peace, finding damnation instead.
There are darkwave dregs between the fingers of the two musicians: Ignacia and Lau do not seem afraid to surround their emotional burden with foams clinging to that musical genre that has managed to arrive even in that land generous in hospitality. And so here they are plunging towards boundaries that can enhance and better specify an undeniable ductility, that openness granted only to those who make knowledge a point of departure and not of arrival.
Warriors of enigmas, in a world filled with news but not with information, these coupled turbulence know how to generate questions, offer doubts, with melancholic propensity, even to the point of making us cry bubbles of despair, understandably. A wild band that starts with Edgar Alan Poe, because of a writing that faces the terror of existence with kilometres of nightmares lined up, of a horror that becomes literary lymph, until it meets the religious belonging of one's own identity, annexing insecurities that convey a preparatory enthusiasm. One can surrender to difficulties, but with this band one learns to love them, rejecting whining in order to shake ourselves and begin the journey into darkness.
They seem to throw acid, heavy stones and then retreat into their intimacy, without delay. Magical, almost naive, very powerful tracks that live on the outskirts of our dreams with the tide, when the water seems to leave our lungs. They can be trusted. Because they are necessary, companions of solitudes that improve our breaths. They put eye-liner on our energy-deprived flows to encourage us, like an apparent deception. Digging into these forty-seven minutes, however, we have the certainty of their authenticity. Which becomes the altar where we lay down our mediocrity and hand them a papyrus of ancient velleities, burning them before their eyes with devotion.
Often the guitars are shrieks that move with bass lines (daughters of the spirits of Araucania), to dance full of impeccable solicitations towards the place of perdition. Like a hill of sins in search of forgiveness, the songs are often splinters that flee from hope, as rivals of nonsense, to breathe in all reality as proof of abilities that are applauded by the sacred fire of the sun.
The distorted arpeggios create metaphors, lamps of oblique wind, the bass instead serious and obscure melodies, pulsing with sick oxygen: necessary incandescences to understand what we are in the days of deception.
Music like quality whiskey, to stun, inebriate, corrupt every temptation. Music that clears the past of all misunderstandings: there is also something new that lives in the breaths of timeless songs, valid for eternity. It is hypnotic fluid that knows how to fill the flasks of our gothic need, like an effervescent cascade of healthy desire.
I guess it’s time, in order to better understand this album full of seaweed and sharp flights of consciousness, for a complete incursion through its tracks, arming ourselves with an open mind and a black lipstick in our hands…
Song by Song
Caida Libre
Tenebrous, fast, an attack on our heart with its limpid connection between Darkwave and Post-punk kissing in the rush of a flash.
Destiny Destrucción
With a stylistic approach reminiscent of many bands from the Oakland scene, the track lives on the explosive connection between the distorted bass and the guitar full of gothic fog.
Lilith
It shows all the duo's ability to make their music magnetic: the rhythm decreases and the suggestions increase, a slow ascent to the sky with a melancholic flight.
El Reflejo de Mi Muerte
The syncopated drum machine, the bass pressing on our belly and then off: the guitars bring all the sadness and vitality of awareness, with the voice magnificently capable of being hysterical and malignant.
Herz Der Niemand
Deathrock shows itself with light footprints, on vocals that explode with magnets stuck in the fog. An almost hidden electronic inlay presents itself in this track, which ultimately turns out to be the most elaborate and mysterious song on the album.
Ruinas
Hell is dressed for a moment of sweetness, almost shoegaze, with the guitar cradling the dream of being a black caress for a few minutes.
Nacidas del Fuego
Pins of moss-filled caves, the gothic belly pulses bloody liquids for a track that creates a tense, soft, hypnotic atmosphere.
Cotard
Surprising and astounding, all the duo's imaginative talent sows its seeds in a breath that touches the corals of poetry.
El Ansia
Between Xmal Deutschland and Esses, Diavol Strâin launches into an anxious dance, grating all the Darkwave scenery that looks towards Deathrock with religious devotion. The bass and guitar seem at times to take turns to seduce the satanically laughing ghost.
Ylak
Queen of clouds filled with pathos, the song declares all the creative possibilities of the Chilean band. A gentle howl, the guitar scratching respectfully and the vocals seducing like honey does with a bear's nails.
Inferno
After a beginning that leaves seeds of The Banshees, here is the jerk and the rush in the Los Angeles that welcomes anyone with the need for deathrock urges in their veins.
Uroboros
Everything comes to a close in the best way: still something new, amazing, with echoes of Hannett's work with Joy Division. Something shatters while keyboards take the stage for a magnetic track, full of continuous loops. A stratified song, with cleverly connected zones that convey pleasant connections to Anja Huwe's band and the dark Germany of the 80s. Vocals disappear and an enveloping and sensual atmosphere sings.
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
10th July 2022
https://open.spotify.com/album/2izATdFOO5hG5deyCyUt4a?si=ossBb4YlSSuxHIKl9fDyug
