My Review
Costume - Preserve Humanity
2021
Salt weather and acid wind surround thoughts, carrying them in a river full of sounds and atoms with dirty feathers. There are those who manage to separate the sun from the black, those who penetrate into things to take a position and act as a sieve, those who use voice and suggestions to sedate.
When it happens in Music it always generates an impact: it is the shivers and true and deep considerations that certify a conscience which pulsates, which does not want to remain defenceless.
And so the time has come to listen to six songs that splendidly accomplish this journey, making our feathers more aware, handing them back the limpid colour of a better life.
They are two artists, Claudia Placanica from Pistoia and Marco Cozza (MauSS) from L'Aquila, a combo that scratches hostilities with an intense and contaminating way of doing things, bearers of thunderstorms in a continuous cycle, tireless in making music and words a decisive and capable union, messengers of commitment, who detect the sounds of this time and the wickedness that sticks to the skin.
They are opposed by crossing reality with a neurotic and sublime manner, skilfully using electronic music as a mirror, techno house as muscular mass and echoes of Postpunk which is kept almost hidden but effective.
Music as a tale able to synthesise after exploring moods, instincts and breakdowns, giving vigour to the will to determine shocks and separations.
Claudia's vocals are a seductive hypnosis, impetuous and generous, with the ability to powerfully emphasise words of cut glass.
This is the case in the opening song Preserve Humanity where, between sighs and a sharp voice, the lyrics become breathtaking glue combined with the music of MauSS, very skilled in giving a sense of psychic agitation in suspension.
Electronic music slows down to inflate the mind with synthetic pills composed of fear, like a bubble of fog that slowly explodes.
With Protect Me, the guitar appears capable of suggesting how Postpunk can still impregnate our desires towards its generous attitude, still able to fascinate. If it does so as in this case with an electronic dress that seems like a modern velvet pregnant with tension combined with Claudia's voice that, like an orgasm of greatness, is inspired by Siouxsie and Lene Lovich of the best times, then I would say that one cannot but be amazed and inundated by earthquakes which eliminate external ugliness.
The short episode Who Dreams 1 smells of Turkey and smoke in a circular motion to stun us briefly but intensely.
Then the roar: Democracy Burn is the gem that brings winter to inflame the sleep of a conscience that is no longer industrious but lazy. This music resembles a grater, flaying the skin, and with the words and Claudia's precise and extraordinary interpretation, it slams kilos of uranium on our faces, because this track is the contamination that advances ruthlessly but seductively.
We walk again inside the mechanisms of a continuous denunciation that this time raises the pace and with A Dead Man takes us inside a desolate and abandoned factory, like in a rave where nobody is left. Claudia wears the mode of an expert crooner who allows herself the melody: here too we are shaken by the call of a mode of expression very close to Siouxsie, but with a music that finds the expressive courage that the Banshees had lost.
And everything seems suspended and disquieting, Transglobal Underground seem to come out of the factory corridors to give their consent to the artistic work of MauSS, here minimalist and gloomy.
It comes to a farewell with Dreams 2: it does so with 56 seconds, essential, like a pelvic movement in acid, sovereign, as if to suggest that the slow dance remains the most deductive and fierce.
An Ep which reveals a propensity for artistic expression which has all the right credentials, with an apparent kindness but capable of exploding too: it takes skill in listening and a propensity to abandon oneself to be able to generate a definitive encounter between those who compose and those who listen.
A work indeed capable of taking us around places made of mystery and raw truths, in a time when reflection is a must and Music becomes a courage that wants to unite: let's give it a chance, since Costume has qualities in abundant generosity.
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
22nd February 2022
https://costumeband1.bandcamp.com/album/preserve-humanity
