My Review: David Middle - A Goth, A Piano & Songs of Sorrow

 

David Middle - A Goth, A Piano & Songs of Sorrow

A moody shadow rises from the skies of Cambridge (he has been doing this for so many years), constantly expanding, using different artistic forms, taking courage, work, talent and misfortune under the wing of his splendid and stubborn need not to leave the world without his obsessions, sweetness, integrity, will to make his own cloak the gaze of his purity.

This expression of nature has a name: David Middle, a gothic, cinematic privateer, at times a mime of life, at other times a cabaret performer who defies blackness by transforming himself like the most voracious of colours. To move forward, to stop time, to build coral reefs with his straightforward philosophy, his vocal chords acute, angular, wisely tremendous and implacable, boiling, a powder keg plundering calm and leading it towards an act of agnostic faith.

A solo album, while his soul has never failed to collaborate with bands and parallel projects, is a choice that makes his conscious flow more specific, in a way that allows an unquestionably strong and circumstantial focus to his lyrics that are so powerful and capable of transforming reality, fears, silence and memory like the pilots of a mental palace that he displays flawlessly.

He uses note strategies in an unusual way, colouring the sonic textures with the wind of continuous inspiration, ranging from Klaus Nomi, to the Virgin Prunes, to Rozz Williams, to the darkest Alice Cooper, touching on Genesis P-Orridge's shoulder and Marc Almond's chin. But it is only the beginning, a false trail, as David has prairies of his own, like the seeds of his so autonomous and original thinking.

Life and its pains are not recounted but rather experienced at the same time, as if everything was going on as we listen, and this sensation, divine and massive, leaves black petals on our breath, making us aware of an addiction that we had not hoped to witness...

We can, in this way, reflect on how the paucity of the instruments used actually open the doors of perception, giving our minds the space to expand the need to fluidify this pentagram that instead of being poor is full of great suggestions. Black and white keys and a theatrical sequence of movements that accommodate synthetic strings and handclapping that suggest silence around them: Middle is a magician out of this time, free of conditioning, so baroque in his fertility that he does not accept forcing from the expressive forms of the present.

He builds sentences that, voraciously, dance in his uvula scratching the celestial vault, the only true paradise that sees his workshop be a cascade of thoughts padded with enchanting plays of light, where dusky is only the start of his artistic, powerful and olfactory, sensorial needs as the orchestra of his beats ends up invading everything, calmly and with a desperate intelligence.

An album for souls adept at being enveloped, involved, to suspend the part that refuses to understand the intensity, the duty of conscience, becoming a distributor of rational sparks that embrace the purity of feelings that have fallen into unwanted solitude. The combination of music and words thus turns out to be a perfect mantra with which to fall into the pleasantness of pain.

The harmonic research shows integrity, knowledge of expressive methods and a great respect for that part of musical history that today's music does not know or respect. David thus reveals himself to be a fighter with notes like gentle bullets, while the words are sabre-rattling blanks, capable of hitting the space that lies perfectly between the mind and the heart.

The artist turns his attention towards nature, measuring distances and similarities, engaging the road of description by harmonising his own complicit spirit, maturing with music an intense, almost mute bond, in order to freely experience a connection with entities that are surely more good. 

One always gets the impression of a maturity that induces David to cradle the wrinkles of his own mind, pushing him towards an almost secret form in which to be a guardian and diviner, in search of truths, albeit uncomfortable, but handled with authority.

When one gets the impression that he wants to sow neo-folk petals, one senses a perhaps anachronistic pagan sacredness, which nonetheless offers the measure of his cultural extension, and his language can be a sweet poison that turns bitter when overturned: miracles like fixtures in the dark...

It then happens to hear him take leave of life (in the majestic Ode to Jacqueline) one feels shivers, as if a friend is leaving, and it is one of the most touching moments to come to terms with. The skilful willingness to give melodies that stick in the mind means that the words do the same, ending up stretching the inches of our listening.

The orchestrations, minimalist and never pompous, also give the measure of an accurate production, capable of giving us the impression of a tale in music that must be reread and reread again: not a syllable of beauty is lost in this work that deserves the best reception...

Song by Song

1 - No One Hears Me

‘Pull me out from the drowning mud’

A dance appears, in the night, to be a tale between anxiety and missed dreams. The music is a balmy gesture across pounding keys with a soft leaning towards the low register...

2 - Climbing Stairs

‘Every fall is a lesson, every climb is a spell’.

The contrast between the heavy, slow notes of the piano and David's singing create a nocturnal flash into which to fall with dignity. A song that seems to come from the theatrical and cabaret tension of the best Marc Almond. And it is apotheosis in repetition...

3 - Help Me Please

‘I, see faces, but memories still fade’.

Memory finds resounding centrality here, and the bass ride and piano counterpoint tear us to shreds. And then that invocation, which turns into a mantra to be kept in the secret circuit of our guilt. A timeless masterpiece...

4 - The Whispering Wings

‘Underneath the whispering trees

French theatre takes the stage, changes its dress and becomes an English echo of the eighteenth century, with a wingspan of the refrain that seems to be a warning, in which terror grabs dreams and kills them...

5 - Final Witness

‘Scared to last you 

never rest’

There's dancing, and without the drumming it's even better: on your toes, like classical dancers, while the lyrics pan around supported by a voice that becomes a weeping needle...

6 - Ode to Jacqueline

‘My time has come, and now i know I said goodbye’.

The rhythm slows down and the keys sentenced, then open their arms inside a circle of loving lights full of tension, invitations, until the finale with a farewell that perfectly translates a score so willing to be grateful to classical music, which here becomes even more evident and necessary

7 - Gothic Candles (Midnight Mix)

‘Through the darkness, we journey hand in hand’

David takes us steadily into the night, into the darkness, to traverse the illusions of dreams and the more obvious and real forms of pain, with a gothic musical setting, as if Rozz Williams were urging him not to lose the perfect theatricality of his singing... 

8 - Walking with the Dead

‘In my heart, the dead will stay’

A feat, a new thunder in the heart and head, for this overture that becomes a pleasant torture, trying to turn a free flight into a dutiful crash. Everything here smells of finality, as if living with death could really be the only joy. 

9 - Our Broken World

‘Our innocence lost in the hands of fools’.

The opening vocal takes us back to Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, but then everything shifts and we enter into a sunny drama, a playfully reasonable contrast, and the music makes the whole thing perfectly cohesive and intact...

10 - A Hollow Heart

‘But through the tears, I'll find my way’.

Despair is necessarily a slow process. Instead, David makes it almost an upbeat, fast, light-voiced phase, and music that seems to tickle the winter...

11 - Dark Love

The most refined, most tense and dramatic track comes almost at the end of the album, leaving dandy petals in the lyrics and musical cues that cross eras and styles only to make us feel the bitter taste of a love full of darkness...

‘A symphony of lust, makes your heartbeat tight’

12 - Mood Swings

‘I laugh until I cry’

A filtered voice, as never before, leads the way to the last song, which is like a hidden epitaph, buried by angelic music with shades, emblematically, dramatic. And it is a soft breath that extinguishes the candle, which we immediately relight to listen again to this album so delightful and meaningful that it is a great pity to overlook...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

27th March 2025

https://batcaveproductions.bandcamp.com/album/a-goth-a-piano-songs-of-sorrow

My Review: The Bolshoi Brothers - The Bolshoi Brothers

 

The Bolshoi Brothers - The Bolshoi Brothers

Once upon a time, and still is, there was a place in Wiltshire, in the south of England, not far from Bath, a place made famous by a post-punk, darkwave band (Bolshoi), whose name is Trowbridge and which for a while carried the quartet's delicious vicissitudes in its belly.

In 1990 the band disbanded and now the Old Scribe is about to take you on an ocean voyage, slow, to the heavens, with a harmonic blend that has ancient, delicate, fragrant overtones, where folk, psychedelia, the dampened skin of Alternative and Indie Rock form the basis for an inevitable rational circle. The eleven songs were written during  lockdown, at a distance: Florida calls, Seattle answers, in an only pretendedly separate path. The ideas, pregnant with moods and matured exposures to the thickening of thoughts at arm's length with philosophy, are set free by talent, by working on meaning, on the back of stories from the protected envelope of sounds that shed tenderness and curiosity. Many are the places over which the songs glide, many the references in which one might find a smile, a relief, but, above all, great is the perimeter of the verses, the arrangements, the singing, the energetic flow, the rays of sunshine that make the Bolshoi of yesteryear a pleasant but not essential memory. 

Trevor Tanner, as always guitarist and vocalist, draws, attracts the listener into his mental prairies, while Paul Clark (keyboards) is the great creator of this kaleidoscope, of this forest that tries to capture the light to feed on hope. And their new residences, American, have favoured an artistic birth in which, between the two poles, sensations, pains, impetuses and a thick sensory vegetation are compressed: an album like a momentum that knows no direction, to give meaning to true freedom.

It is rock that seems to be born from the burrs of Lou Reed, from the Australian psychedelia of the second half of Church's career, and even calls to mind the 1990s period of British bands that reproduced the thrill of the American shore that was specifically inspired by that of Boston. And that of the British band Eat. Moreover, there is the thrill given by the works of bands close to slowcore, especially then when a melancholic sense prevails in the refrains.

The old sombre petals are not absent, the broadsides of toxins, but the whole is more polished, with the ability to enter even country areas, almost like a challenge, easily won, as the two have never missed the appointment with irony (as in the song Cowboy Chords). However, throughout this artistic exercise, the guitars are always far from swallowing the whole: they are generous, attentive and scrupulous, willing to translate the passage of their lives. 

It takes courage to write a flutter of wings, when previously they were describing insecure footsteps in the dark night on the streets of London.

The testimony of adulthood, of a path that seeks development, cannot be tied to nostalgia.

There are elements of contact with a glorious and dangerous idea: to orchestrate existence with songs like a Matryoshka doll with the intention of contact, as if the songs were pages inside a library eager to fit into the palms of our hands.

When Beautiful Creature arrives, it becomes clear how the American rock roots are capable of revealing the post-punk side of yesteryear, but clothed in a luminous film close to the enchantment of a miracle, which is perfectly successful. The presence of the nineties is strong in at least half of the tracks, however not as a limitation, but as a muscular gymnasium of solos capable of bringing the sound back to its rightful place. And then the Blue Aeroplanes often peep in, as does the feel of a pop cabaret in search of shy applause, and Trevor's acting takes the stage of madness, with quotations, references that are truly remarkable. One dances with awareness, smiles and finds generous tears in the splendid and conclusive This Town, a true intuitive jewel, capable of surprising and dragging into the intimate locality of reasoning every fear...   

Fulcrum, barycentre and arrow free to separate from the dungeon is the mammoth Platitudes of Scorn, a biological treatise, a vocabulary of beauty that, starting from English psychedelia, lands in the claustrophobic American ballad, to become the piece on which to connect the sunny and the sombre sides of the two musical craftsmen, here in total harmony, to give not only the song but the entire album an inescapable sense of epicness.

They have grasped the sense of the passing of time and let it turn its back on them, without bitterness, without unnecessary eruptions of anger. A resounding discipline, made possible by their own production, makes the whole thing feel like one long breath from eleven feathers, each one heartening the others.

Small sparks from their past can be found in the penultimate composition, Built in Obsolescence, a crossroads, a pill that from the mind of a past tries to reach reality. Amniotic, neurotic, electric, it is definitely epidermic in that it knows how to hold an enormous amount of time by compressing it into a minute-length that, although short, is very representative of the period that was glorious for them.  One cannot do without Suburbs, that second sonic enchantment that sends shivers down one's spine, for the writing that burns away hostilities and restores meaning to provincial living, to stories that risk remaining unheard.

One can do without a passport but not without identity: here, the aforementioned This Town reveals remixed old loves (The Velvet Underground), which in a moment of freshness manage to fool the movement of the hands of the clock, only to move on to the Beatles and England, for a homecoming.

Which is perfectly the dominant factor of this record: starting from the limit (the lockdown), to find a new residence: the one within oneself, for a resoundingly harmonious and intense result...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

21st March 2025

https://thebolshoibrothers.bandcamp.com/album/the-bolshoi-brothers

My Review: The Slow Readers Club - Out Of A Dream

 The Slow Readers Club - Out Of A Dream

Hands, traces, smells, projections (some direct, others inclined to a diplomatic form of relative exhibitionism), bring the whole thing into focus like the end point of an exploding excrescence: there are facts that cannot be told, the world is not ready, and a dutiful silence kneels before a technology that has rapidly become the centre of gravity of an advancing void.

Could Mancunians The Slow Readers Club shy away from exposing the pain, the anger, the worry, from describing the world gone mad?

Certainly not, and in these ten new songs they have not neglected to employ the dripping ribaldry of blood and shavings, with a work that recaptures the band's old ardour, displacing after their album two years ago that had sown smiles, signs of peace, and exposed the Manchester band to a political stance as well.

We find ourselves with the individual at the centre, in an emotional peristalsis that does not disguise itself as a discard, keeping, unfortunately, the whole in the body of a mind without reference points. They take away space for escape and invite us to introspection, to consider optics that we thought were no longer necessary.

The music nods, borrows vessels, streams, shreds of light and sows aching petals, with a more moderate grafting of electronics and yet finding the right compromise to allow the sound streams to clarify Aaron Starkie's lyrics, here, perhaps more than ever, the album's true protagonist. It is a moderate dance, with two tracks that shake your legs, although overall you get the feeling that you are doing it with a sword of Damocles over your head, which makes it all dangerous. There is no joy in these verses, not even in the notes, bestowing a miracle of clear and pure sincerity, no falsehood, as the Manchester band has put aside what is now meaningless: no deception certainly permeates these compositions, which instead stipulate a contract with a strategic path in time. 

They advance, they retreat, but never anchor the how. This makes the work a constant operation against pretence: fans will be shocked, probably not happy as it lacks those fast songs that enter the heart. Everything is slower, deeper, more mature, and it is an essential form of redemption against those who pretend compared to those who really love.

Songs like night beacons, with the waters of the ocean of living trembling, cold and disconsolate: there is a world that takes space (the technological one to be clear) that worries because it knows how to obscure relationships, values and time.

Conflict becomes a cry, marginalisation, havoc, and music the binoculars of a shaky conscience, while people all around dance without conscience.

Readers are even slower, bent, with Aaron's haggard eyes, intent on describing in depth what is prone to change a history that has decided to change forever. For the worse.

Songs witnesses.

Songs rudders of a dazed advance.

Songs like mute slaps, without bruises on the skin.

The attention to moderating the aspect of dragging the crowd into the place of sharing is evident: the notes are heaps of fog, just as the words are cobblestones that take away the security of balance, which is increasingly precarious. 

An oppressive silence becomes necessary, with solitude as an inner hermitage, remaining anchored in a sociality as the bulwark of a new contradiction. Lies, broken promises, and love inclined to dissolve are the main themes of a concept album that is visual, cryptic, but so fascinating as to fully stun. 

To succeed in conveying all this in notes, chords, solos, the main dynamic emphasises a shrewdness never noticed in previous works: sound planes as if planed by a mature sense of order, in a mantra less exhibited, but developed through arrangements laden with poetry and an abundant quota of a new poison, created by the band itself

The bewilderment generates fear, the fear that comes out of the tail end of this fake evolution ends up in the grooves of a vinyl that sounds like a stone in search of its proper emptiness, but the will not to bow down wins out, in the search for a dialogue without grip but preferable in any case.

Aaron's voice finds the updrafts that lead him to expose his weeping vocal chords, in an obscene path of enrichment and stun, with the falsetto taking up even more space, with words that seem to be paralysing but never the result of a flash or a mistake. Rather: he has found a way to elevate his already rich writing ability and, in doing so, here are diminished slogans and catchphrases, to instead place his visions in a sensible, fluid, amniotic, introverted circuit, but always near a lamppost with sad, worried eyes.

The climax is softened (only apparently) by a couple of ballads, which, however, eventually become a via crucis in which the thorns seem to enter perfectly into the flesh of thoughts that struggle to remain strong...

There is a form of discipline, of constructing a sense that manages to galvanise Old Scribe, and you can sense it when the band considers self-quotation in the scorching Loved You Then, which, with Dear Silence, is the only episode in which the fast rhythm carries everything away, as if the words were less blunt.

Perimeterless, introverted, caducous, almost genuflected, this manifest intention to employ the art of confrontation that does not fear confrontation becomes the only hook, the only way to bring the listeners into a necessary embrace, especially in front of the devastating Our Song Is Sung, probably the most intimate moment in the entire catalogue of the Mancunian line-up. 

The voice, the arpeggio, the kneeling synth become an operative poem that shakes, tears down and shreds every possible resistance...

One becomes an orphan, a prisoner, a doll, a deactivated transistor, and thus free to think, to bring oneself back to reason: ten slaps that raise pride and scatter it in the dark zones of a struggling pain.

A record of these times, seen, described and brought to the ceiling, to illuminate the steps...

There is a thorn that must be removed and a new one inserted: probably this soundtrack will lead you to choose, to deny yourself complicity with stupidity and there will be nothing but an ocean with the intention of becoming a virgin again...

Song by Song

1 - Technofear

'You're talking too loud I can't get no sleep'

War changes faces, strategies, enters the corridors of unconsciousness and shoots, straight to the heart. The Readers find the synthesis, not only photographing but insisting, throwing words into the rhythm that confuse, thinning the truth in a song that explodes its strength in the refrain like an inevitable fragility, also thanks to the chorus that weighs it down without giving in...

The guitars bend, leave the synth phrasing, but remain sewn with their post-punk ardour to seal an absolute faith...

2 - Animals

'And so we shelter here that life outside has got so hard'

Echoes of Abba, of Blur, of OMD open the stage to host a syncopated theatre where passionate love seeks a spell. And here is the couple in the light of modernity generating fragility while, for its part, the music tries to translate it all by varying little and leaving Kurtis' guitar to remind us of The Edge in the days of Boy. Everything is fixative and the chords try to find the shortest way not to hurt themselves, and succeed in doing so...

3 - Little White Lies

'Our day is coming, our love is built to last'

Surprising, parental, bewitching, slow, far from the cliché of the four's writing, it demonstrates how to insist on a concept while minimising any suggestion that differentiating oneself is an obligatory choice. Thus we hear a poem that trembles as a loop rummages, the simple drumming lulls the steps and the bass protects, with Aaron bringing his voice a stone's throw from paradise, which awaits the couple described in the lyrics...

4 - Dear Silence

'Stepping outside the rubicon no rules apply no law this is fight you fight alone no turning back no more'

What is invoked has the awareness of a developing power: here silence advances as hypothesis, as glue, as incipit, as benefit, as a desperate place to visit. The rhythm is assertive, the rhymes dazzle, the meaning stuns and we travel into the early nineties with the sound of Kraftwerk's train.  Energetic, this gem can offer miles of escapism like a slingshot that can quickly return to the sonic home of the early days of this formation. The 'old' Readers show up here and it's a joy for those who can't love their evolution...

5 - Know This I Am

'Know this I am, know this I am, I am the face in the mirror - haunted'

A guitar harps in the wind, mist descends into Aaron's sad strings, chills rush to compact and, as the singer takes up the high register, you find yourself being fragile puppies, with death knocking in the back of your mind...

Dramatic, it reveals a totally tormented caveman, becoming a murderer lulling blissfully in the restrained explosion of a guitar that sounds like a fistful of salt, while the drumming seems to be a message from Jupiter...

Love, faith, hope mutate to be bullets that can create an unexpected conflict.

Devastating...

6 - Boys So Blue

'Fake a laugh, paint a smile, boys in pain all the while, all an act, oh what can I do'

Scars: how to put them to music?

Alcohol, drugs, sex, take hold of disrespect and find themselves protagonists in this track which, like an unexpected overdose, seeks the applause of death.

The keyboard at the beginning takes us back to Cavalcade, and then the semi-acoustic guitar becomes the absolute chant that paralyses even before Aaron's actual singing. It is an urban, sullen track that tries to be kind to ugliness, winning hands down...

7 - Pirouette

'I've grown accustomed to thе life I was given, while taking hits from all sidеs'

Everest decides to take two steps, or rather, to dance, to bring a kiss to the temples of a dancer travelling in the vision of an unrealised arrival. Hope persists in the future while a gloomy cloud brings the song to a refrain that struggles to arrive, consciously, by choice, to relieve only at the right moment an evident tension.

Readers' electronics here are fully willing to take Kurtis' soaring guitar riffs and bring Everest to a happy rest...

8 - Puppets

'We could have been anything but world revolves around greed again'

Ten years after Cavalcade that brought them into the alternative circuits, the third track seems to reiterate the concept that the eighties are the years in which one can plunder, to which one can turn one's eyes. It is a very sad, intriguing moment, with a sound carpet on which to spread greed and hatred with the only real guitar solo on the whole album, in which the heart decides to go into apnoea…

9 - Loved You Then

'Loved you then but I hate you now does me good just to say it out loud'

The train arrives, guitars and synths in cahoots, sharp, piercing notes, the polar cold entering the lyrics, in a world dominated by greed the band decides to explore the recent past and change the rules of the game, even though they have the same cards. 

Fast, punchy and mantric...

10 - Our Song Is Sung

'Searching my mind to find something to say get out of here'

And that's the end. Which remains, relentless, in pastel-tinged verses and notes, to generate tears and mudslides, with death opening its arms, smiling, while the singing sweeps away the dreams, in a synth that surrounds the pain with feathery nights, and the guitar plumbs its claws gently, in a poignant and paralysing hiatus. The Readers' saddest song ever closes this album, and one struggles to imagine a track that condenses the truth with greater skill than this one. And the falsetto, shuddering snare that sweeps away the light makes this close a blessing.

And we go back to listening to the first one to fool ourselves, while the truth the four of them have etched it forever...

Alex Dematteis 

Musicshockworld 

Salford

6-3-2025