My Review: Joy Division - Closer

 Joy Division - Closer

‘The greatest pain in the world is that which, drop by drop, pierces the soul and breaks it.’

Francisco Villaespesa

In human history, there are ties that are passed on without direct contact, like a trajectory that swings covertly. In this case we are talking about the Odyssey, the transplant of the most extreme adventures that, in March 1980, in just thirteen days, decided to enter the musical body of a project full of symptoms adjacent to the original, a catastrophic and hallucinatory journey, gliding into the cold clearing of Britannia Low studios, in Islington, London, to deliver us not an idyll but the metre that measures the difference between good and the most extreme ills.

There are 41 kilometres between Salford and Macclesfield, and the four boys shared this distance by travelling to Manchester, the grey dome of existence at its murkiest and most turbulent. The fun lay in escaping reality, creating imaginative islands within an electric circuit of musical notes and extreme paradoxes. The culture of the city was leaving the idleness of the early sixties and in the middle of the seventies was pushing to gain sympathy, favour and star approval. Joy Division were the most obvious break, but they were never thwarted: the Buzzcocks saw their black beauty and welcomed them for a tour during which JD wrote the nine songs that gave Unknown Pleasures a sad record, still alive today, of making a new album that belied much of that attitude but lacked quality.  Closer is a reasoned, devilish, magnetic scream, a magmatic wave of fatigue, introspection, a black-and-white fever that lingers on, without hesitation. It collects the detritus of a soul in disarray, the enthusiastic pulsing of the other three members, young people full of vitamins and hopes, delightful slackers in search of a status that will take them away from this urban agglomeration increasingly at odds with everyday life. The texts, in fact, are a daily diary in which thoughts are not assumed to be artistic manifestations disjointed from reality, but are instead the cast, the imprint, the attitudinal snapshot of a will that is specified in the affirmation of weakness as the limit that cannot be beaten. Nine compositions divided into two sides: the first gravitates within the systematic intention to show inaccessibility, the unpleasant that requires freezing while still managing to make the soul sweat. The second is a mass of thoughts in total decay that are accompanied by gloomy, lapidary music, full of rain and wind, to carry away, in posthumous memory, an absence of energy that resembles a song without the magnets of despair.

Right from the cover, where the religious significance is eliminated (only an arm of the Madonna appears and Jesus of Nazareth is almost totally hidden), we understand that we are before an image that does not summarise the content but rather indicates the departure, the intention, the extreme beauty and intensity of the fascination with death, shown here in the act of proximity, of welcoming, of shedding tears. But JD's second work is not a synthesis of grief, not even a heaven that through exaltation can lead to devotion. It is an account with the scales on one palm and the bewildered gaze on the other, in a dynamic play of forces that can make you lose your co-ordinates. Closer is a roar in the form of a toy with dried cheeks through a surgical Post-Punk that contemplates the assumption of new expressive methodologies. Here, then, in the grooves appear, ‘softly’, the itches of a frightened Coldwave, the first vows of that Darkwave that will take its rightful share of responsibility immediately after the release of this jewel.   There is no shortage of elaborate psychedelia and a propensity to give noise a validity that in industrial music could also cause annoyance. The record, by means of Martin Hannett's cursed ability to achieve that perfection not appreciated by the four of them, mummifies emotion (the spontaneous kind) to generate a mental short circuit in which bewilderment, fear and tension make it all seem like the fruit of a film projection, allowing the horror and the dramatic to coexist, not forced.

Too much has been said about Ian Curtis's suicide, about the will and so much other gratuitous naivety and nonsense: instead, we find ourselves in the territory of unbalanced expressions, ungovernable impulses, joy and sorrow as an inescapable fetter, with the ability to provoke thoughts full of constantly falling blood magnets. Ian talks about himself and does so in front of a microphone: no will knows this dynamic...

We are supposed to think how for once the music was disinterested in the lyrics and that only a magical conjunction could make one believe in a connection between the two. But Bernard, Peter and Stephen at that time did not even listen to the singing of the poor boy divided and atrophied by spasms. After forty-four years it can be argued that this was a good thing, a mind-boggling coincidence. 

The themes addressed in the record are spectral circumnavigations, with fatigue glued to the lack of all hope, a polishing of death by extinguishing life, depositing dreams in the vault where all interest could not mature. Erect, weedy, electric and powerful, a slow anvil with accelerations that precede the long procession leading into the zone of silence that can deliver the truth. The tracks are united only by the fact that the musicians and the vocals are perfectly recognisable: for the rest, it is an avalanche that disrupts every harmony and the delicacy dies second by second, snuffing out dreams and ambitions to conquer a hermitage called Masterpiece, the one that makes no one happy, the saddest one imaginable…  Everything in this modern getsemani is heading towards unpleasantness and the impending clash between the desire to hear how it goes and the absolute will to turn off every transistor.

And there are still people who call this work ‘dark’...

The delicate glass of this latest creation is nothing more than a circus where the clown does not come out, he shows his trick through Chinese shadows, and the horses, the usually untamed ones, here sit and have their manes combed by the frozen tears of Ian, the unintended protagonist of a lacerating solo, verse after verse. The atmosphere, leaden and vibrant, often leads to annoyance, to the reaction of souls who would like to deny the true identity of a stomach-churning listen. Rituals, ideals, dispersions, clashes, from Punk's ‘No Future’ to ‘I'm fucked’: it seems like so many years have passed, but no, with this jewel Joy Division show how any impetus can lose its fury and find the slime of increasingly conscious and capable friction. It is shocking that the band forgets the poetry of methodical Post-Punk, made up of literary references from the late 19th century, to become the outpost of a series of furious introspective analyses: perhaps this is precisely why the genre definition for Closer loses its value, as we are catapulted onto a couch discovering that a psychiatrist struggles to gather information.  It happens with words as with music: the song form, only apparently, helps to believe that madness is not a spring that takes life and makes it bounce neatly. It is exactly the opposite and this is where the difficult management of arthrosis, arthritis and degenerations that seem to fall into the lake of discontent begins. 

One has to identify the zones of belonging, those of rejection, those in which the band clashes with itself, with the producer, with time, which does not seem able to accept that these children do not watch over the real, but instead decide to position themselves on the tail end of time to say goodbye. Everything dies in these nine songs, no hypothesis of copy and paste, of a reproduction or a continuation, because the true masterpiece is the one in which its own sense, its own space, in the mysterious location that makes no one comfortable, is an unattainable archive even for the future.

Closer, from the initial sensory earthquake, becomes a galaxy in continuous explosion, amidst tribal rhythms, boiling genetic circles and the demagnetisation of all trust. One cannot and should not like this set of tensions, but they must be swollen teachers with dubious diopters because, perhaps, the first gain of this work is precisely to give sight as little importance as possible. And so it is that the auditory apparatus finds itself succumbing, unable to cope with these non-songs, these disharmonies, out-of-tune, anxieties, apprehensions and cadaverous sounds that bury every smile.

It has a temporal collocation discoloured by the lack of knowledge and memory on the part of those who did not know those years, lived them, desired them: many albums from 1980 are lysed, punctured, thinned blankets, and if this one has resisted it is only apparently because of a link with the tragedy.

Now it is time to descend into the aisles of these compositions to give awareness a decisive uppercut, for nothing is granted to the listener but to have a nearby void into which to throw oneself...

Song by Song

1 - Atrocity Exhibition

With a tribal beginning from which the Cure would take a lot, we enter the zone of non-melody, of a continuous psychedelic infiltration that is counterbalanced by Ian's singing, the only one capable of painting a subtle harmonic line. But it is a riot of sounds, sabre-rattling, with the bass that seems to join the funk to slow down the acid vein of Bernard's guitar approach, while Stephen puts ice in the veins for an unintended homogeneity with the singer's words. A nerve-wracking, lengthy beginning that immediately makes things clear: Closer will not be the party of well-combed senses...

2 - Isolation

Unknown Pleasures appears only for the neurosis-filled bass and drumming, for the rest we feel the presence of a synth that throws the band into a new zone and perspective: preceding the temple of music with an exaggerated display of mute expressions in circumspect display. It seems to put doses of cheerfulness in that keyboard but, instead, the song is a splendid contortion, in the precipice of a loneliness that advances and demands attention. It dances like robots on loan from Suicide, rather highlighting the boundaries of a rock in the process of excursion.

3 - Passover

The autonomy of intention, when impregnated by blackish certainties, is supported by hinted and sharp guitars, an almost hidden bass, a simple but military drumming, until an evolution is discovered that will generate, in Bernard's arpeggio, a new musical genre of which The Sisters Of Mercy will be the first disciples. Ian is a calculating diviner, ruthless, surgical, never impulsive, he holds back the catastrophe of the verses in a singing that only seems to be devoid of all emotion. A song that shows the creaking of the soul and a capacity of the music for constant alarms, the unwillingness to find a moment when the song can know different heights. Mysterious, diluting in each of its movements the desire to live...

4 - Colony

The glam attack, then off, after a few seconds, into the territories of Killing Joke, where the nervousness passes through the cables, the rolls and oscillations of an epileptic guitar...

Roaring, exhausting, a progression of cuts on the skin and the feeling of a gem that wants to hide...

5 - A Means to an End

The future only knows itself after death: this ballistic miracle sweeps away the history of Post-Punk, of all preemptive doctrine, to open stupor and stiffen nerves. It invites the dance to remain tied up like a mental prostitute, to generate delirium and various illusions. The first moment of a skeletal construction of future New Order appears as a decaying rainbow, measuring things, impulses, relying on a guitar that seems to be a child of the Banshees' Scream album. But Hook's bass is the real mantra, the one that hypnotises before Ian's baritone singing seizes our souls for eternity....

6 - Heart and Soul

A life, excesses, extremes, magnets, turmoil and obedience to a destiny to be hastily written absorb the entire composition with an almost sweet, perfectly tuned, almost powerful, utterly devastating singing, within an architecture that does not linger but finds the method to structure everything in a few movements until giving, in the finale, the impression of a voluntary abandonment to itself. Everything is hinted at, measured, skeletonised, cooled, placed in the cellar of decisions that wear out the nerves, annihilating them...

7 - Twenty Four Hours

The manifesto and apotheosis of a twisting of muscles finds the Post-Punk drive within bacilli and viruses that make listening a free-falling sky, without footholds. Magnetic, dark, devastating, it entrusts the musical trio with the task of drawing tears, while it is up to Ian to illuminate the existential disaster, in an epilogue that shatters every dream. The voice, cleverly illuminated by the obscene dust of an arctic village, renders all joy useless, with the embarrassment of a listening that could, alone, break every breath...

8 - The Eternal

Martin Hannett writes his epitaph with the Manchester band, lending his class to a song that is nothing more than a procession measured by the minimalism of a piano that touches the tears bringing them inside Ian's words, to give this stage the smell of intellectual and physical rubble, in a floral abandon that enchants though paralyses. We enter the intimate, the normally inaccessible places of a soul in quarrel with itself, where the evident fracture is mirrored in the theatricality of dark, greedy atmospheres. Music dies through a gloomy spectre bouncing in the drizzling voice that annihilates weeping. Nothing like it had ever appeared before and it will not find the future sighing for a sequel: the track is a procession that goes beyond definitions as it is embedded in a cloud that dissolves second by second...

9 - Decades

The last petal is synthetic, a keyboard that seems to come out of a black-and-white video game, a progressive and lacerating consumption of all vitality enters the graveyard of dreams to synchronise youth with the old age of every will, in the exhausting decadence of an existence that erases every snap. A keyboard solo leads Ian to pose a question that puts absence on the throne, head down, in a space where every breath into the microphone becomes a syncopated cry that does nothing but pronounce an obligatory sentence, leaving the heart in its damnation. Dry, like an acrylic palette without pulses, the song enhances the mood of the album and embraces the band in its farewell: there is no goodbye when history has decided that this work will be unique for posterity, with the imposition that nothing will have to resemble it...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

9th May 2024

My Review: Duran Duran - The Chauffeur

 

Duran Duran - The Chauffeur 

When fairy tales are tinged with black, burdened with drama, sinking their hands into the sacrilege of pain, confusion becomes the only clarity, in a frantic race towards that love that denies to open wide, to be consumed without evil waves.

We are lucky enough to be able to think about all this while listening to a gem that resists wear and tear, that still wounds today, for a strange apologia that cannot be scratched by opposing theories. A jewel full of glitter that does not suffocate the magnificence that dwells in its depths, a realm where magic and secret continue to pulsate. The Birmingham band, who deposited this deathless comet on its back in the treasure chest of time, wrote this song in the maturity of its adolescence, vessel, train and above all car, to bring moral concepts aboard a story where love, passion, annoyance, the inescapable consumption of desires could become a thorny message, a mental sting that, creeping in listening after listening, would cause paralysis, as the only true act of devotion to a circuit that was already capable of generating addiction. Knowing how to conjugate the pop sensation to a bundle of greyish tensions with the use of synths (the true drivers of this slow ride), is a truly remarkable operation, with the ability to leave a bitter and sweet taste in the listener's mouth, in a combination that cancels out all competition. The piano in flanger mode, the sensual bass, the work of programming, of the drum machine and then of the drums all converge in a lyric, in the voice, to head into the belly of the night, the perfect setting in which to relate to meditation, a fact, in itself, to be experienced as a disarming event if one takes Duran Duran for what they were, young men in search of success and unjustly not considered musicians of talent and great ability. This song takes care of clearing up doubts, plunging the class into the hourglass of time, where nothing can have an expiry date. What magnetises the whole thing is the poetic flow of this text, a story that reeks of frustration, of a secret love that spies with no chance of being reciprocated, in a flagrant rational detonation that engages the heartbeats, in a pulsating drama that sees musical genres converge in a hall where reception and study are crossed to complete the perfection of a project. In this scenario, the fun disappears, dissolved by these sonic textures and Simon's nasal voice that seems to suffocate the words with its high register and then fades into the final crooning.

 Traces of Baudelaire, of Ian Curtis, of the insane theatre that tries to paint the walls of the brain with dark colours, descend in the hypnotic waves of the track from the very beginning, with dramatic piano notes that already exhibit heavy breathing, to channel the magnet with no possibility of release towards our listening: the whole is a push towards the bowels of desire, its attraction towards the impossibility that exalts death.

The synth arpeggio is the real devilish drop that descends on our eardrums: deceptive in that it is apparently pleasant, with the passing of seconds it becomes a torture that leaves no escape, allowing a synthetic flute to bring momentary relief, a new form that captures the auditory apparatus.  The synthpop nerve is able to patrol the decadence typical of post-punk, for a mesmeric miracle, a 'pleasant' straitjacket, a loop from which running away is impossible, like from the Alcatraz penitentiary. In this context, the unsettling approach in the writing of a commitment becomes evident, qualifying the band and putting them in a position to be worthy of being heard by those who turn up their noses: all swept away by these three hundred and twenty-one seconds of Hamlet-like propensity, where everything gets complicated, becomes an adult metaphor that clings to the sceptre of undeniable qualities. Here we are in the stark reality, there is nothing prophetic, no lie, but a long ordeal that does not disclaim responsibility, in fact, it does the opposite, to generate conscious motions that obscure the future... 

Minutes like insects take their place in the alchemic form of a song that also flees from itself, having on its ankles tenebrous notes that emphasise the feeling that in the 1980s even being a voyeur of love meant being part of the team of suffering, in which the object of desire, so coveted, became the only culprit. Duran Duran took him and locked him up in the song that attests to his guilt, for eternity...

One has the feeling that the five of them took drops of water and deposited them in the notes, filtered them, cuddled them, and then let them go towards their destiny, as if everything was just a foretaste of a new artistic mode that would soon be fully revealed. And it did come to pass: from this pearl have sprung not only unhinged imitations, but also artists capable of trying to repeat the miracle of this rational and sensory procession.  The refinement, the production, the work of synergies stretched towards the candlelight that makes the scene gloomy make one shudder, ending up with handkerchiefs full of tears slowly dancing in the pockets while listening, alone.

When music has no chance of denying itself permanence in the vault of heaven, becoming succubus remains the only viable joy, despite the context...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

21st April 2024

My Review: David Potts - The Blue Tree / The Red Tree (2 albums)

David Potts - The Blue Tree / The Red Tree (2 albums)

How funny life is, when it fills the planet with existences that seem to have little visibility and then immediately throws them back into the streets, giving them a new chance. Such is the case with the protagonist of this piece of writing, an unquestionable talent, capable of creating, with his imaginative and skilful versatility, two albums released at the same time, almost as if to plug the hole of an absence that in the Old Scribe's opinion seemed like blasphemy, given the value of these twenty-one compositions in total. Two trees, two father figures, owners of this artist's path, with only partly similar connotations, see the musician (guitarist and bassist) and singer move between alternative, indie pop, sunnier folk, elegant and light dance.

In 1989 in Manchester, the bass player of Joy Division formed a band called Revenge. One of their members, who replaced the original guitarist David Hicks, is the subject of this review. After that experience with Peter Hook, the two of them set up the Monaco project, which was so successful with the track What do you want from me, a starter for the set of dance attitudes they wrote.

And after several years, here we are talking about David Potts' solo debut with the albums The Blue Tree and The Red Tree. 

The Blue Tree appears as a description of a spring day around this tree, with songs that fly like birds happy to be back in those places, free to move with joy and able to contaminate the enthusiasm with their youthful exuberance.

The Red Tree seems, on the other hand, to be a collection of songs written by those same birds with a few more years, where maturity also shows itself in more angular approaches, where the rhythm remains high but with more decision in tracing the path of those flights. One gets the impression that one is on the verge of autumn, but with the desire to still have those smiles that only spring can distribute.

In both works the writing is astonishing, delving into the heavenly territories of the 1970s and continuing into the next decade in the aspect of eclectic, danceable songs. The guitar, when it lends itself to exhibiting short but effective solos, demonstrates its intention to capture the meaning of the compositions, further refining them, making us vibrate and fly with our minds around those two trees, which, at the end of listening to the two discs, seem to be long-standing friends.

One is able to smile, laugh, think, dance in a sky that seems so far away from Manchester, to find images, places and feelings that show us the world far and wide, with the merit of getting us into the long-awaited time machine. 

Definitely a wonderful debut that should not escape your musical hunger, if you want it to be covered in quality.

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

19th April 2024

https://davidpottsmusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-blue-tree

https://davidpottsmusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-red-tree-2

 

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