JOY/DISASTER - HYPNAGOGY
My God: how beautiful, how rich...
The wind of shortcomings and approximations is blown away by a cylindrical rose containing eleven emotional explosions that tangle the stomach and sublimate the senses, in a rush where everything is left behind, with the future about to bless this fluorescence full of claws and delicious punches in the face. It all happens thanks to a line-up that has been sowing prowess for some time now, and with their latest work HYPNAGOGIA achieves artistic perfection, without smearing, offering an artistic sampler of enormous dimensions, both in terms of content and form, because in both situations their range is solid and banishes all doubt and uncertainty in those who might be sceptical. Instead, the freshness, the power of the structure, the branches, the liveliness with which black and grey approach the sun of life make one's mouth open wide: there are prodigies that must be supported and this is what must be done. It is eighteenth birthday of the band from Nancy (France), and it must be said that with their coming of age these men, who kiss life with nettles, brambles and blue roses in their mouths, have conquered an enveloping, disorienting maturity, through a churning sea of arrows, with sounds that tell even before the riffs and the succession of chords and melodic textures.
Ever since the rocky debut, back in 2006, with JD, the Old Scribe has seen expressed the talents of a multifaceted, edgy ensemble, capable of slinging itself into the terrain of research in order to govern the throbbing needs that had to emerge. With the subsequent Paranoia everything was clear: the magnet had been deposited forever in our hearts. And then a crescendo with no possibility of stopping.... But let us come to this last gasp, the new work, which will forever remain in the pool of every desire.
What is impressive is the band's deep participation in human delirium without the risk of soiling the soul: the feat is to enter reality and not observe it from afar, making it all believable, for a sensual play of moods, smells, and descriptions of the human psyche that astounds. Inclined to the Post-Punk temperament from the outset, they wear the fluid guise of a Guitar Rock that envelops the rhythm section to enhance, through continuous interlocking, their intuition and desire to complete what a single musical genre does not allow. Here, then, is music that scratches, absorbs, claims listeners through enchanting phrasing, moody vicissitudes, sowing intense manic debris, deconstructing the conviction that everything has already been said. Robust is the opposition on their part, and it is an action accomplished through rhythmic and melodic pounding, which swallows up any reluctance and develops the ocean of reflections that knead to tears. The determination to find a style and erudite our ignorance is a sanguine satellite, devoid of poisons but dense, like a tongue of asphalt. To do this, every single track favours the perfect embrace between thorny melodies and rhythms that show a concrete ability to distance themselves from those who feed comparisons and reminiscences. They discard, with great pride, this risk and trace the musical sky with trajectories full of novelty, without denying a historical framework that has suggested but not determined the mode of expression.
The greatest creator of all this goodness is Nicolas ROHR, an illuminist of pulsional gravity, the French magician who engraves on the staff with a treble clef placed over his heart. And, when the syllables come out of his throat, he rushes into the heart of every nervous tension... Sebastien MASSUL is the pilot of rhythm, with phosphorescent sticks and powerful arms, but melodic when necessary, to give the drums a poetic and robust role. Simon BONNAFOUS is the band's second guitarist, an angel with a cloak full of drops of blood who delivers gentle punches. Soupa RUNDSTADLER is a four-string magnet, capable of making the earth a continuous earthquake, and his blows are lashings that make the skin a continuous shiver. Like an operating theatre in which the surgery consists of extirpating cancer, so the four French artificers pounce on the lifeless body of life to remove tons of dirt: they intervene with a firm, decisive hand, scraping away all the impurities, to restore dignity and relief. These songs are therapeutic, rummaging through human history and projecting their talents into our veins. The singing, in English, is confident, the lyrics well written and the vocal mode is a mirror, precise, of how thoughts and feelings can establish a perfect union.
Everything is supportive, convinced, like a dark marriage that penetrates into the bowels of behaviour: the lyrics are swaggering, direct, they focus on the human experience where fear is not allowed but touches it, succeeding in the feat of coming out on top. Human relationships are full of descriptions in which dreams and promises are a carpet of troubles that they tend to compact towards a liquid dissolution, bringing the truth of all mediocrity before a mirror that sweats and trembles. The energy they produce is a divine gift, which shakes you up but at the same time directs you to make better use of your time, because they have succeeded in teaching a lesson to thousands of bands fossilised on a few, dull, bilious schemes, refreshing all music: don't disperse this mighty miracle. Now it's time to navigate through this seaweed infected with irresistible beauty...
Song by Song
1 - Celebrate
Celebrate, of course we do, the song that opens the album: on an initially slow and melancholic start, the four then manage to stir the spirits and launch, progressively (thanks to a bloody bass), the whole thing into a hypnotic riff and melodic but baritone singing. The lyrics are a functional invective against an interlocutor wasting his kingdom, in the time of change that stifles every dream. The solo is exploding rust and the drumming a shotgun blast...
2 - Fear
A poignant display of a decaying relationship, everything is orchestrated to be a tribal mantra, with a willingness to give indie rock a chance to flirt with post-punk. Tears gathered in the shadows celebrate the courage of a song that exerts a continuous fascination, with the energetic duality of guitars that swaggeringly render these emotions like an eel escaping death...
3 - Nowhere
The ballad that kills the truth: when all that is revealed sinks the enthusiasm. Dramatic lyrics find the right sonic backdrop for a combo that grates all vagueness, until the lead guitar plunges over the ocean of pain. Compact, it exhibits a theatricality reminiscent of the moods of early post-punk, with an eye-breaking trail of death: let there be precious tears...
4 - Sorrow
Can one describe failure without projecting it into the mire of slowness? Joy/Disaster succeed, with a harrowing arpeggio, a rhythm that slaps the senses and a refrain that is a crown of thorns. Decadent, electrifying, melodic, it strips away all whimsy in a gothic-sounding pulse, where, however, the bass and drums bring us back to a rock that pulses with life. The song that reveals the breadth of their abilities.
5 - Whispering to the wall
Human frailty and meanness are nailed by these initial notes played by a piano full of pain, then the song gives the stage to the singing for a bitter but truthful account. Dark, gloomy, metallic (in that it has all the semblance of an uppercut thrown at our desires), the composition offers the best side of that long line of bands that tried to bring darkwave and post-punk back into the plane of necessity in the 1990s. Here, the four do much better: they oxygenate the present with their melancholy and wisdom. Another nail in the head...
6 - In the end
With the same class as Madrugada, the French combo writes a treatise on wisdom, with the experience of having to compare the real to the dream, to write a different ending. Slow, capable of being obsessive with guitars that are almost hidden but then sublimely accompany Nicolas in a refrain that is an electric shock full of needles and thorns...
7 - Changes
Time, which stagnates and does not change, is surrounded by words and musical notes that make it clear how the band is inclined to keep its foot on the accelerator, but with its eyes open. An up and down, where the rhythm changes, rummaging between our legs, to launch us into a disjointed dance, like puppets stunned by so much evolving force...
8 - Wiping tears
Demons and desires live in the same garden: the four of them raise the tempo, fill the cannons and launch a bomb, fearlessly, to overtake mediocrity and write a new, bombastic treatise of sweat and truth. The drumming and bass are fiery gunslingers eager to make a killing, the guitars are actors with a wonderful, glowing script and the singing the icing on the infectious cake...
9 - Promise
Take Franz Ferdinand and make them hermetic and dragging in a dance full of spectres: a theatre that approaches cabaret, with the rhythm favouring the plunge into the void. Simply enchanting, with a gothic corollary glimpse, for a listen that makes our legs turn into golden wings
10 - Secrets
My God: so much beauty, so much richness... Everything depends on decisions and Joy/Disaster extend the discourse in a vitaminic, robust, lysergic, atomic, scorching path, where at the end of the listening everything burns inside... There is no negativity, but the bitterness of existence that swells the notes and makes our eyes rivers of tears in a gaseous state...
11 - Into a dream
The dreamlike aspect has almost always found adherence in ballads, in gentle flows surrounding poetry. In the last track of this jewel-filled album, however, we witness a display of robust skill in transforming the subject into an enchanting electric arpeggio. The whole is supported by a melody capable of shoving in our faces a series of words that, like the notes present, compact the need for a farewell conscious of a new hallucinating addiction: like the other ten, this song also seizes and unloads its adrenalin in our inebriated listening...
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford, England
23 November 2023
https://joy-disaster.bandcamp.com/album/hypnagogia
mercoledì 22 novembre 2023
My Review: JOY/DISASTER - HYPNAGOGY
mercoledì 18 ottobre 2023
My Review: Gintsugi - The Elephant in the Room
Gintsugi - The Elephant in the Room
"We are never so helpless towards suffering as in the moment when we love."
Sigmund Freud
This beat, pilgrim, tired, eager, white, descends from its throne and crashes on the craggy planes of the mind, the nuclear powerhouse of all pain. Stories, vicissitudes, various contortions, well-assorted and ill-assorted, squeeze into the existence that seeks footholds. Into this context comes a woman with a sharp tongue, an iron wrist, a discipline that positions itself in every gesture, thought, with gentle ferocity, to allow her a wide range of action. Her name is Gintsugi, the voice that melts the cracks of metal to cling to sweetness, with a lively plan aimed at bewitching the stars, creation, time to unite them in an exercise that dazzles: bringing the obscenity of pain to school, teaching it life and throwing it into virgin but already wounded notes... The imaginative lanes, the expressions that are never too didactic launch the young Italian-French artist with continuity into a border that is never squared, with long uncontrollable banks. One ends up trembling, weeping, reflecting, with implants of light visiting the unexpectedness of living, its often unpretentious limbs, to enter into a gastric lavage at heart height.
One finds oneself, mistakenly, with the presumption that the entire work has dreamlike propensities: it is reality, the truths and lies of living that Gintsugi shows us, in a pentagram tuned to authenticity. We encounter modes of expression that vary, but which undoubtedly make art rock the main reference point. One cannot deny other matrices, classical and pop imprints oiled, as a guarantee of a project very broad in its intentions, even to the point of creating a resounding concept album, even though it may not have been intended.
Right from the title (a truly exhaustive and powerful English idiomatic phrase) to continue with the touching cover image, everything is positioned, from the start, on the level of a totalising, paralysing undertaking, concluding in the state of need for continuous listening. This is not a sonic ensemble out of step with the present time, nor should the absence of din be mistaken for a clinging to older expressions. The freshness of this incredible talent lies in maturity, to turn the hourglass into a dutiful exercise in understanding so as not to waste anything that is happening.
When, in addition to her main instrument (the piano), strings are heard, small vibrations arrive in the parks of her feeling, perfectly positioning the concept of usability, continuous and incessant. Her sweetness is a sinking probe, bringing foam to the mouth to be spat out, with class, on the keys of her emotional pilgrimage, in a dynamic visit to the souls, shifting accents, dissolving twists and fears. Four singles, two instrumental tracks, a crazy cover song, would be enough to make this record stainless: it is unlikely to be scratched.
Take Lilac Wine: the splendid cover of Elkie Brooks' 1978 song about the loss of a lover with the comfort of wine made from a lilac tree reveals a portentous attention to the colours of her uvula and is sung as if that pain belonged to her, orchestrating it in a mixture of tears and hope. It is precisely this magnetic need to face what is uncomfortable and contrary that teaches us much on a human level. Music is her first vocabulary, her nascent nerve, her growing up confronted with unrestrained suggestions, with her infinite breath, her coming together with reflections that find their voice in the notes, so that the role of communicating thoughts is not only attributed to words.
The electronics, the timpani, the drums, what seems lateral to the structure is instead an almost invisible magnet that compacts these expressive, emotional, rational cascades, which often become poignant, uncontrollable tides. One can crash in front of this ensemble, one must be prepared and very strong.
These are compositions that reveal impulses, dizziness, planning held together by a balanced bow that knows how to shoot arrows into the sky of every unpredictable need. Gintsugi is an orchestral conductor of a whole that comes at us, employing moments that are more accessible to others in which one feels thrown violently to the ground. Her idiosyncrasies are, I would easily say, summed up by a voice and mode of singing that swings, like a mystical swing, through time, having great points of reference, artists who have made the history of interpretation. Natural talents, undeniable, but consider also that in this album deep, accurate and intense studies cannot escape: everything had to smell close to perfection.
When the sounds of the uvula are absent (after having caused intense trauma), the musical part does likewise: there is no competition, but an acclimatisation in the only desired direction, which is to be not only performing but above all effective. There are moments of great brittleness (the opening Mon Coeur and Hex), only to hear the rustle of clouds caressing our hair, penetrating the skull and reaching the brain. There, thanks to these sparkling sonic earthquakes, everything becomes clay, in a feverish state. There are moments in which the tension seems close to horror, where the clouds of human happenings seem to crash and fall until they reach the belly of planet earth. Others, however, in which the songs seem like invisible, impregnable breaths, conveying colours full of life. Suffering, in this undeniable masterpiece, is not an impediment: instead, I would say an opportunity to learn, to transform blackness into a winning act. Is there space for dreams, can they be seen, pampered, experienced in these tracks? Absolutely not, and it is precisely in this aspect that the greatness of a woman who walks head-on with the wind of contrariety facing her, coming out in pieces, must be exalted: Gintsugi has a series of sweet and powerful weapons to live the present as a will and an attitude.
The Old Scribe will soon write a review on the lyrics: other miracles that make this listening a dutiful and pleasant benefit, above all instructive. In one specific track, we see the feeling emerging that she has learned to draw from a precious source: the track is To Grace, a splendid child of Tori Amos' absurd visionary abilities. Many are the frequentations of her powerful background, but none so decisive: her greatest merit is that she possesses a style of her own, intriguing, overflowing, capable of an unquestionable personal identity. Produced by herself and Andrea Liuzza's label Beautiful Losers (also featured on the album), this feathered vessel is compact, in a momentum that seems to carry behind it trails of smiling tears on a day when everything seems to be subjected to the harsh judgement of a sky full of lightning. Nine explosions with the reins, where everything can go within a film to place its destiny: such a powerful debut will be one of the wonders that will remain in the temporal sphere for the duration of infinity.
I won't write the review song by song, because you can't get inside the wind and because to see a rose bloom you can't put your fingers inside it...
The conviction remains that this is the first true masterpiece in so many years, and to keep it that way, one must be discreet: love it, listen to it, bring it into the centre of our need, but always keep a distance that is called respect, because Gintsugi deserves it more than many others...
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
19 Ottobre 2023
Out on 20 October 2023
https://gintsugi.bandcamp.com/album/the-elephant-in-the-room-2
sabato 17 giugno 2023
My Review: Catalogue - Modern Delusion
Catalogue - Modern Delusion
The Marseille band's third album is a chaotic journey into the 80s, to put discord inside our convictions, to create doubts, to make us experience nostalgia but slaughtering it all with their devastating irony. Post-Punk, the dirtiest kind, infects us with Noise, as a fun way of disorienting us, but then we immediately realise their methodology, pungent and complete, to lead us to evaluate well what is left of that decade. And here's how they jump back and forth, in and out of references that are multiple but never able to make us realise how much is the real basis for them. This aspect makes them wonderfully and damnably interesting: the delirium of a necessary fervour dwells in these songs, there is an awareness that bumps and teaches, over and over again. Here, then, we are tampered by their art, without a refuge, because they make us dance under the stars, without the need for a future, except to be accompanied by their incredible mastery of being lions roaring over our bored brains...
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
17th June 2023
https://catalogue.bandcamp.com/album/modern-delusion
giovedì 15 giugno 2023
My Review: Lila Ehjä -yö
Lila Ehjä -yö
An extraordinary talent, Lila: capable of having precise ideas, of knowing how to choose the right instruments, how to play them, and of being precise in the structure of her songs, so full of intensity and that seductive penumbra that galvanises the listener. A refined display of a methodicalness that absolutely needs strong and emblematic themes, the album reveals a darkness that admits to our gaze. The French nature of the plot is beautifully preserved and everything becomes minimalist in these Post-Coldwave flashes of great generosity, where the electronic part keeps everything compact. It's lashings of overflowing Synth, a series of stimuli that shake and then there's her voice that perfectly sums up the contrast with the musical side. After almost two years, yö is still a clear spark in the darkness of a music that struggles to be a clean mirror...
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
15th June 2023
https://lilaehja.bandcamp.com/album/y
https://youtu.be/CjnW7v5khZs
giovedì 8 giugno 2023
My Review: Rise and Fall of a Decadence - You or Sydney
giovedì 4 maggio 2023
My Review: Gintsugi - Mon Coeur
Gintsugi - Mon Coeur
Writing through tears is sometimes a boundless thank you: it happens when magic, depth, intensity establish a strong contact between those who create and those who enjoy it.
Of her, the enchanting Luna Paese (aka Gintsugi), the Old Scribe has already spoken and he returns to do so because a spectacular song is coming out, one of those that will be part of the album (The Elephant in the Room) to be released in October.
The mouth opens wide, the shock advances in the room of amazement, with a great difficulty in feeling worthy of this vessel of medieval woodwinds running through the blood. A piano traces the course, for fingers that know well where those notes must glide: well into the stomach of Time, and they succeed in doing so because they have decided to make us lean towards the imagination, with customs and life from a few centuries ago. And, like an oil lamp, comes the Italo-French artist's vocals, which are a grassy mantle that spreads over the keyboard of her instrument and creates a story in which the pain, given by the impossibility of a love between two men, sets the conscience on fire, using a register of voice that dances between the low and high registers, to give credibility to a lily that is born in the heart while listening to this murderous delight. You can also hear her hand in the arrangements: the harmonic and melodic use is resoundingly perfect, masterfully supported by a precise electronic line that unites the distance of time and makes everything credible. Dramatic yet streamlined, soft and capable of showing rough edges, the composition is a statement of strength that makes this artist able to look her colleagues in the eye. No, let there be no juxtaposition, no wasting of energy, no seeking of escapes: Gintsugi has her own style, her own sensitivity, a pen and a strength which deserve some deep listening. A song that has in its evocative melody its magnetic wave, a triumph of salt thrown over mistakes, the conscience of a woman who takes sides and works to defend human rights, in this case those related to love. And she invents a story in which she finds solutions. One also notes the sublime work of an arrangement and production (in cohabitation with Andrea Liuzza, owner of the Beautiful Losers record company) that establish that the details of this incredible enchantment were made possible by the great initial idea. Those hands, those notes, that voice: heaven welcoming a secular prayer that respects the right to love. The song is a clear emblem of this, bringing attentions, reflections and impulses, as a profound contribution to respect.
It happens, therefore, to experience it as an act of displacement, of participation, where inequalities and differences are surrounded by the wisdom of the track, an engine that lives its moment with ease even as it creates ancient suggestions. Memorable, dense, it will only enter your awe as it happened to the Old Scribe: if contamination exists, let it at least be for something beautiful and healthy, and Mon Coeur certainly is...
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Supino
4th May 2023
Out on 5th May 2023
https://gintsugi.bandcamp.com/track/mon-coeur
lunedì 24 aprile 2023
MY review: Art Decade - Urban Line
Art Decade - Urban Line
France, 1991: for once we can celebrate a reissue that may allow many to see the enchantment of the Lyon line-up. The trio had established the possibility of flying over the known, of taking us into the immense zone of hungry novelties and not excluding a priori what we already knew. An avalanche of games with precise mechanics to broaden their genius towards new formations that had guessed, at that time, how much wealth was deposited in this lightning bolt of mutant colour. Dark, silky tones inside guitars that owe much to the Cure, but on the whole other suggestions are possible. There is a need for exploration in the songs, which is clearly evident: they fluctuate, there are no digressions, only immense qualities offering their face. From Post-Punk, to the most mysterious and almost hidden Progressive, from Darkwave evidently in need of contamination and not purity, everything comes together in this perennially switched-on mixer, to allow these amazingly insane contraptions to emerge to generate our satisfied delirium: you are loved by this album, lock up your day and abandon yourself to its venereal circle...
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Supino
24th April 2023
https://artdecade69.bandcamp.com/album/urban-line
domenica 23 aprile 2023
My Review: Callière - Freefall Into Heaven
Callière - Freefall Into Heaven
A flood of colours comes from the talented French artist Andrey Rose, who with his new album spreads his skills on an airship: he will travel around the world, hoping to land in the hearts of those who are looking for the sweetness and poetry of notes instructed to celebrate life. Capable of trajectories that make Shoegaze the skeleton of this means of transport and Dreampop the wake, the gifted musician shifts the earth's axis with his textures, slow and intense beats, where sound is the violin key to our immense fortune. Ten landings on the melodic planet: like an architect designing in a closet, he makes all his emotional traffic fly away, starting from a small place, which is his shyness and form of respect, and then dragging listeners into his rainbow.
Wishing you well on your time Freefall Into Heaven, hoping that these songs will become golden seeds in your chest...
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Supino
23rd April 2023
https://calliere.bandcamp.com/album/freefall-into-heaven
venerdì 21 aprile 2023
My Review: Any Version Of Me - Summer After All
Any Version Of Me - Summer After All
A book should be written on Baroque Pop, especially the French kind, the kind that doesn't lend itself to too much contamination, that stays locked inside its umbrella. We have a lucid example of this by listening to this work, an addictive pill of joy, because of the rhythms and melodies so perfectly aligned with positivity. Don't think you are hearing a record from the sixties: study well because everything is older, it is only the sound that can fool you, but the old scribe has faith in you. So: there are doses of propensities from the past that have arrived in this project, like a long ray of sunshine full of goodwill. One dreams, one dances, one spins in a circle made up of Alternative references in instalments, without exaggeration, to make listening a precious act of love, without anxieties, problems, in which earthly vicissitudes still allow one to open the windows and enjoy the view...
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Supino
21st April 2023
https://anyversionofme.bandcamp.com/album/summer-after-all
giovedì 20 aprile 2023
My Review: NLIGHT - The Kiss Of Death
NLIGHT - The Kiss Of Death
How obscene is the pursuit of beauty: for millennia we have been making the same mistake, not examining the error of our ways and indulging in taste.
Take the solo project of this French artist, capable and willing to take a sword full of brambles and draw notes in the air that seem laden with guilt, with gravity that cannot be erased. He writes a piece that plunges us into the intoxication of a truth that will kill us, but we can only acquiesce to the whole, because we have been placed in a position to receive a gift that opens history wide. Almost mute, mysterious, gothic to its bone marrow, it excavates and lubricates human history with unexplored wisdom. It lives a kiss in the text, it lives a funereal embrace in the music, and it lives the knowledge that the genre, the musical style (multiple and various) are only one of the means to express a conceptuality that enriches us, while the breath takes its leave, not before having thanked this delirious miracle…
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Supino
20 April 2023
https://nlight.bandcamp.com/track/the-kiss-of-death
mercoledì 19 aprile 2023
My Review: Leroy Se Meurt - La Chute
Leroy Se Meurt - La Chute
Almost three years have passed since this Ep: it is unforgivable to linger any longer to describe it. We are inside a neurotic corollary of Electro Punk waiting for your dancing steps, which will end up being a genuflecting lava of sweat. Vibrant, effervescent, the four tracks really show Paris snubbing snobs, and going all out to produce dark-faced magnets. The result is a sublime nervous breakdown, real, contrived by human beings rightly corrupted by exaggerating in quality: they are irrepressible, they take ebm and pluck it, to inject its chromosomes into this exaggerated, perfect electronics.
The singing is a series of polite screams, classy lashings on notes trained to make a rag out of you: chapeau!
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