My Review: Adrian Borland - Beautiful Ammunition

Adrian Borland - Beautiful Ammunition

"Stress, anxiety, depression arise when we ignore who we are and start living to please others" - Paolo Coelho

There are years that resemble storms, precipitous, wanting to reset the Earth system, in all its functions.

In 1994, Soundgarden's Superunknown, The Cranberries' No Need to Argue, Jeff Buckley's Grace and Nirvana's Unplugged were released.

And then Adrian Borland.

The singers of all these bands are souls who now perform in the sky, amidst hardships, comforts and scours inaccessible to us.

If the Old Scribe has to choose which of these albums best blended dream, positivity, shadow, frost and thaw, the flow of light-seeking impetuses, there is no doubt that the former Sound leader's is the one to look at most deeply, given the enormous flow of elements that made his third but first true solo album the one closest to a human miracle. 

There are rainbow signs, splashes of a mind trying to repair the damage of a circuit injured and weakened by precise abuse, as there are also parachutes, slingshots, the sweat of an avalanche that seeks a sincere mirror in the writing of music. Adrian creates a set of songs with the intention of sheltering himself even more from disillusionment, he who had invested dreams and reality to bring his talent to the world stage. He had failed, as had his fellow travellers who had made the Sound into knights in fine uniforms but losers. Here we seem to see (at last, I might add) a writer capable of using bridges and reflections to tap into musical genres that are little practised or difficult to associate with his path. 

Courageous, epidermic, uncompromising, sweet, romantic, he does not fail to give brushstrokes of his frustrated psyche, but with the intention of putting a candle in the verses and above all in the sound system, where semi-acoustic guitars take over and he tries to play with changes of atmosphere, of rhythm, to bring his powerful sensibility to the edges of a more pop and songwriting construction, skimming the paths of Leonard Cohen, Tim Buckley and Neil Young. 

No comparisons, but only the intention to highlight the true nature of a soul that seeks to lighten the sharp blades of its electric guitar and its voice, which, in this work, is in a medium-low register and when it reaches for the sky, it does so without shouting, crying or intent on making the lack of oxygen heard.

The personal pronoun I is used within an almost total absence of interlocutors, and it seems as if we are in the vessel of a Storytelling full of water to be cradled, cared for and scattered away from those fingers that in this record prefer to divert the electric current to favour places that can offer a minimum of serenity. 

If one digs inside the lyrics, bitterness, disappointment, anger are replaced by helplessness, resignation and an incredible positivity that puffs, pushes, wants to emerge and swim in those days that seem to be built to give his feet a safer path to walk on.

We witness a process conceived and executed almost entirely by Borland, displaying eclecticism, determination and a desire for the intimacy that he had somehow always denied himself. Compared to the first two works without the Sound, this one seems to be a confidential conversation with a mind that breaks free from its clichés to structure new hypotheses. 

Sure, the production is close to perfection, the songs, while not showing the idea of being prone to the zone of conquering the masses of listeners (they never took the risk, to tell the truth, and it was certainly for the best), seem to assert an independence, as if the moment should be historic for them in particular. But you get a strange feeling: you can sense how sixteen ivies are full of a poison with a deceptive face, like a scam that rock can no longer afford. 

Adrian tries to write atypical ballads, often forcing the colour of the sound, sometimes kneading the acoustic and electric zones like a clown playing, clumsily (but only apparently) with pain, only to regret it and pull down the shutter and plunge them into the usual darkness...

One cries, with a spiritual stature unscathed by the passing of time, to smile and embrace the future, and then that song in which he seems to paint a ray of sunshine never seen before: the door is open...

But Beautiful Ammunition is a confetti that knows how to lose its colours, to fall quickly, to get stuck under the carpet, to stick to the skin, like a pleasant nuisance from which it is impossible to separate. His singing makes the famous nerves flex, calculates new spaces, scours unimaginable visual trajectories and seems to run slowly, in a dutiful and ultimately heartbreaking oxymoron.

Nothing to be done: suffering has not abandoned him, but has at least allowed him to look up and make him believe that the present and the future are no longer enemies who look at each other in the eye.

When the tones become dramatic, fear clutches our hearts, we become accomplices in its fragility and tears well up.

The more delicate work in the lyrics is accompanied by sound graffiti that seem far removed from the dramatic, but often one notices how no one can renounce the other: the war of words, the almost rambling, the lowest points, are as if rebuked by the stave that would like a writing free of sadness. Mission impossible, but everything risked reaching the colours of Harlequin's mask. 

How much beauty, irrefutable, is offered by this exercise, this struggle with the tattoo of an armistice, which is manifested in the totality of an album that does not photograph but writes destiny, like a post-dated identity that will find its precision and its eternal painful form on 26 April 1999...

All that remains now is to walk out of that open door, take Adrian by the hand and go for a nice walk with this clean-faced river that, if you stop to look at it, in its obscene depth, will make your legs shake...

Song by Song

1 - Re-united States of Love

'Redraw the map, push the frontier back'

A beginning that seems like a farewell: there is nothing clear except in the notes of a guitar and drums that try to stop the words, but nothing stops the vocals, on the chorus with Vikki Stilwell (present in several episodes on the album), from tracing a smile

2 - Open Door

'I've felt the darkness of the world, but now I need some light'

Lou Reed faces off, as Church and Alarm seem to do, in a gathering that smells of the eighties, with the song searching for footholds in its past. Glowing on a rainy day.

3 - Rocket

"We could blast right of here if you put some thrust in me"

The applause from heaven seeks Adrian's fingertips and his uvula: like Joyce's tale, everything seems to yearn for spring. The electric guitar seems to smell of e-bow, but then slips into a semi-blues approach...

4 - Stranger in the Soul

"But I don't feel the pain that loneliness brings".

One of the most poignant episodes of this prickly soul: he digs, he fumbles, with a circular guitar that tries to extricate loneliness from his hips, in a tangle of emotions in which nothing changes but one wants to pretend otherwise. The stop and go shows us delicacy, almost Spanish-like notes, and a sun inclined to fall...

5 - Break My Fall

"You'll break my fall and my heart will never know".

Initial echoes of the Cocteau Twins are immediately halted by Adrian's voice, which cadencedly advances into the trap of reality, gracefully scampering through the burrow of depression...

6 - Station of the Cross

"I can't relive each moment when I got too close to truth".

The programming finds its apotheosis, new solutions ride the scene, in an excellent musical guise full of novelty. The piano chords are chasms, while the angelic voice flies through the sentimental labyrinth colouring the trust and stopping the pain...

7 - Simple Little Love

"They took apart your simple heart with their calculating minds".

The rhythm becomes close to country again, with the American thrust of the world's most famous dream entering the verses, then catapulting the Australian attitude of the aforementioned Church into a swinging rhythmic whirlwind...

8 - White Room

'Can't you see how this splits me then you'll see how I crack'

Radiohead were able to take their cue, like many other bands, from this irresistible and heartbreaking track: even grief has poetry at its centre of gravity and Adrian has found it, recorded it, performed it, with the music sounding like a slide that, starting from childhood, concludes its wanderings into death

9 - Past Full of Shadow

"Between the lines you misread the signs".

When the author of Winning decides to take our breath away, we don't stand a chance: the perfect production gives the song the right amount of drama, in a suffocating circuit that yearns for the white skin of a soul now extinguished. Signs of arrangements and rainbows full of rain give the piece the Nobel Prize for the most tears shed...

10 - Ordinary Angel

"I tasted grace and got drunk on bliss"

There's running, pubic-adjacent sounds, tumbling and rolling in the alcoholic meadow of a dream never so seemingly free, with the electric guitar propelling Adrian into the high register of his voice to caress the clouds where angels await...

11 - Lonel Late-nighter

"A song in the sad key from the heart of man tell me not to be ashamed to cry"

How to connect the ballads of the eighties to the yet-to-be-broken-in ballads of the nineties: Borland searches for the refrain, the swinging vocal, to find the tears free to melt away. One of the most verisimilarly pop moments of the whole album: gorgeous, innocent and cruel at the same time...

12 - Someone Will Love You Today

"Could be the man who sells you the paper a cynical sparkle of hope in his smile"

U2 will be jealous (Gloria, that is), as Adrian Borland demonstrates a talent the Irish never had: how to switch from irony, to a pop drop that invokes the alternative and then ramps up, with extreme simplicity, in a refrain swollen with air to kiss, until the final drops of a guitar in the smell of J.J. Cale.

13 - Forgiveness

"But we are full of pollutants"

The winter of the mind arrives, the footsteps become slow and the shadows gloomy, camouflaged strings throw their strains into the lyrics that dismay but specify the path of an existence in search of help. When the two registers of voice are in unison, there is no longer any possibility of resisting the pain...

14 - Rootless

"I've been sawing through these chains".

The most atypical track on this album, with its searching solutions, inventive singing, a scaffolding that seeks support in talent. Everything escapes and probably makes this episode the least convincing...

15 - In Passing

"These yellow lights are not enough to illuminate this night".

An arpeggio, a sky, a need that cannot find identity and permanence: the feeling is of a dutiful attempt to show the cracks in a mind that remembers days gone by and finds itself with empty glasses...

16 - Shoreline

"And you wish you had a life at least somebody you could die for, why don't you open up and breathe?"

The highest and most touching moment is reserved for the end: he who does not cry has no heart, no passions....

One enters the psyche of a dream, the contrast with the deafening noise of tragedy raging in the calendar and the gamble of not forcing one's hand. The words win, they steal the show, and the voice becomes the stage for a skull falling into the sand still covered in skin and heartbeats. By the time you glide into the refrain the tears have oxidised...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

18th April 2024

 

My Review: James - Yummy

 James - Yummy

Let joy be the only contagiousness that is permissible, approachable, sharable and embraceable. Music is in danger of losing its ancient peculiarity, which was to bring minds and bodies closer together.

James, with their eighteenth studio album, provide, as is often the case with them, the example, the stimulus, the possibility of maintaining qualities and finding new ones. Their approach is still that of a group of people intent on renewing their passport and their identity, proposing new stylistic forms, generating amazement at their profound intention not to sit back on the past: too intelligent, too far ahead to profit from the love of their many admirers. Yummy is a docile roar, programmed to creep in without making too much noise, but with the unquestionable quality of pushing you to commit to listening. It will take a lot for many to be able to accept, firstly, this willingness to write hermetic songs, little accessible to easy chewing except in brief moments, especially in the choruses, and, secondly, to be able to clearly ingest this intention of a writing body that seems to be 'limited' to four of the Manchester band's members. 

Many, both musicians and listeners, remain anchored to what brought them together, favouring a decidedly immature and nostalgic side that fails to appreciate and consider the need for an identity to grow. A continuous noose around the neck that turns off any new and innovative flow.

There are times when a sound ensemble can be a funnel: this makes us all fall into the space of beauty together and there is nothing more sensually appetising than a rainbow floating in time. James take it and show us its intensity until we can smell its fragrance. They have never been tied to their home territory, never direct and devoted sons of their city, but rather musicians capable of flying over the world and absorbing its smells, tensions, dreams, enriching their attitudinal vocabulary, navigating changes, showing them, and enriching our lives with pulsations, reflections, dances in a continuous way. The latest work demonstrates all this, starting from the sounds, from an incredible general groove that seduces and shakes, to continue with Tim's lyrics, once again skilful in renewing language, directions, dimensions to confirm the very high level of writing.

The live experience with a gospel orchestra and choir allowed them to renew their repertoire, but it was certainly also an opportunity to suggest new possibilities with these twelve hypnotic sirens. Life, death, success, anxiety, exaggeration, pain, irony are just some of the singer's trajectories. But the music knows how to do the same: not only the perfect bride of the lyrics, but an eager parent giving discipline to ever-awake, capable talents, able to bring it all to a high state. Multiple sensations and emotions find themselves injected with positivity, like an act that cannot cease to exist even though the world seems to opt for suicide. Here we find joie de vivre through the freshness of Leo Abrahams' production, the sensual movements of continuous blends of the most elegantly focused pop, the use of electronics that is at the root of different musical genres, like a sensory circle that rejects a single dimension. Furthermore, listening becomes vision, a film that changes script, skilfully continuing to physically vary the characters' features. In doing so, everything becomes a gathering, attendance, assistance, friendship, a committee of ideas that progress without ever tiring. 

In the fifth decade of their incredible artistic journey, James of recent years seem more swaggering, less interested in the politics of consensus and, like justifiably stubborn mules, they walk through their choices with pride and satisfaction, to be able to show that music, at least the music of writing, belongs to them. Afterwards, it's a different story.

One is often moved, the question marks seem like missiles in party dress, harmless in that they do not kill, but certainly not intended to pass unnoticed. In fact, one's stomach often finds itself calling for oxygen, one realises that the quality that has always been part of their DNA (that of communicating things one knows in a different way and saying other things completely unknown) is still very much present. It changes the dress, not their being students, first of all, of themselves. It hurts, let me tell you, to think that a band should be the executor of the dreams of those who love them. These nine souls turn their backs, walk through the songs like breaths in the night rainbow, like invisible spirits, but in the end, when the day wakes up, you realise they were right, depositing songs in the sky that slowly stick to your heart, lubricating those veins that are less and less capable of passing new molecules through themselves.

Yes, Yummy is a surprising record, modern, prone to grouping sounds and vocabulary on a day when boredom and melancholy seek a foothold, a helping hand. Here it is, present, constant, inclined to be an eternal embrace that, if it apparently seems difficult to assimilate, has actually made a pact with time. They are patient these young old men, perceptive, knights of taste with big hands, so that they can take our uncertainties and place them in the zone where everything rests. 

Salvific, regenerating, literary, these twelve songs are the overtaking of ignorance, unsuspected stamps of a new way of belonging to the colours of prodigious work, spiteful because they deny everyone access to the ease of deception. One must study, shift the centre of gravity of vices and bury them, for eternity...

More and more the sensitivity of their art emerges, no longer a megaphone that attracts attention, but a set of pages to be read in silence: this is the real magic of this latest album by James...

Song by Song

1 - Is This Love

An emotional blanket, capable of going beyond the questions, permeates the sonic fabrics and like a surgical procedure worthy of Houdini, brings the band back for a moment into the stylistic territories of the early 2000s. One dreams, one writhes gently around a track that links a minimalist strategy of instruments to an epidermal flight provided by Tim's singing.

2 - Life's A Fucking Miracle

The world, with its chaotic social assemblages, manages to find stability with the knowledge that life is, in a secular way, an unquestionable miracle. Slow, straightforward, it arrives at the centre with a refrain that establishes the desired contact with reality that must be updated, changed and assembled. Showy and rigorous, it fully delivers to the world the flexibility of their conception of artistic creation.

3 - Better With You

Tim Booth and Chloe Alper become the actors in a love drawing that reveals how sweetness has always been the James' prerogative, here with the skill of a progression that, starting from slowness, manages to develop angelic plots. Freed from heavy chains, the singer flies lightly in the current of the winds. How to bring the 1950s to the present day...

4 - Stay

An extraordinary example of how tension is capable of conveying a lack of footholds, eluding all definition, to be a chameleon in search of challenges, this piece demonstrates the alchemic structure of improvisation, of conscious flows that do not require to be placed within rules. A guitar arpeggio that smells of heaven, drums that hold us in its grip with its simplicity to make a pop song the caress we need.

5 - Shadow Of A Giant

Jon Hopkins lends his fingers and talent to the track's introduction, in what is the album's dreamiest and longest episode. It climbs up to meet the stars, with the strings becoming the thermometer of our emotion, for an incredible ability to extend the notes in a progression that envelops the senses. We travel between sadness and anticipation, with Chloe's voice wetting our faces in the distance until Saul's gypsy violin makes us cry...

6 - Way Over Your Head

Tim Booth once again turns his gaze towards conditions where precariousness, weakness and poverty have no way to smile. He takes care of it, however, with this lyric and the music seems to be waiting for the final chorus, capable of making the palpitations vibrate. It is an invitation to look for someone to put the suffering to sleep and it is in this part of the song that many James lovers might be satisfied: sometimes the armistice happens between those who want to go forward and those who stay behind. When the band builds a sonic palace like this one realises that the love for them will not end, because everything here feels like a harvest of fruit along the notes that slowly swell the chest...

7 - Mobile God

A weapon, constant and dangerous, reveals its existence: the music is a continuous vibration, a probing of expressive possibilities, to leave to the lyrics the analysis of a reality subjugated by the technological use of communication, in which the actual slavery shows new chains. The groove is a mixture of electronics and guitars that surround the lyrics with a dry chord until reaching the refrain that frees the cadenced circuits from the chorus that vibrates in the circuits of satellites full of information that clog our lives. Clamorous!

8 - Our World

The world plummets with its own physical upheaval, unrecognisable from a short time ago, saturated with alienating selfishness and experimentation. The opening whistle is a marvellous deception of the subject matter and, as with the Smiths' best moments, the contrast between words and music makes for a constantly alert fuse. Melodic, pop, it actually thrives on chaos made gentle...

9 - Rogue

Life should be a conscious state, not a mass of events. Starting from this consideration, both words and music make intuition, duty and a new consciousness accessible. In a successful attempt to maintain existence in a state where decisions are consciously structured to improve conditions. The semi-acoustic guitars return to bark and it's pure joy, Jim's driven vocals and bass that catapults us, with softness and vivacity, into an effervescent dance.

10 - Hey

Joy, cheerfulness and dynamism make this episode the one most intent on making smiles and laughter physical, in a pure act of uncompromising positivity. It begins, however, as a sorrowful, chaotic flush, only to lose its electronic afflatus and become a modern lullaby that, instead of making us sleep, makes us realise how music is a bridge between truth and the need to change our convictions. The title is repeated several times and then dilates into deadly instrument crossovers.

11 - Butterfly

The moment that will make those who have always loved James exult. All their past characteristics are deposited here in a perfect song, a kiss to their history, a thank you and a bow, in which the embrace of time gives enthusiasm and great joy: if there is a place where everyone will be happy, it is in the angelic dimension of this episode. The beginning is a psychedelic thread that then becomes, in Jim's singing (for a few moments) an embrace of 'Really Hard', from their debut album Stutter, and the most delicate moments of their history that we are fond of.  We are moved with immense, liberating joy....

12 - Folks

It sounds like a farewell, a bitter smile, which with cello and trumpet seems to make us understand time as a very long matter indeed. The singing becomes evocative as never before: it shows the wrinkles of energy and worry, its voice like sand from an hourglass about to settle in the arms of infinity, the silent, voiceless one. Touching, dramatic, the farewell reserves emotions and coughs: his worries are ours too. The piano notes, distorted in the distance, seem to come from the theatre of fear, then everything melts away, harmony and melody tracing the road on which Tim's words become dew to make this last episode an anomalous waltz in the context of a pop song that kisses infinity...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

12 Aprile 2024