My Review: Pink Turns Blue - Black Swan

 

Pink Turns Blue - Black Swan

It was the 1980s, Leeds was generating an enormous rational and emotional flow, which had been given the appellation Post-punk, and everything had become core, guts, bark, feather, crowbar, to contaminate first European soil and then world soil.

The musical city par excellence watched, studied, measured first and then distanced itself, knowing how to quickly become a dark beacon, in the vicinity of a gothic and literary involvement with no possibility of contradiction.

Berlin created an infinite grey of which two musicians were paladins, but without any desire to be its pivotal and most prominent exponents.

Pink Turns Blue are an almost religious institution for that Germany that knows how to love its children, sure that the duo (now become a trio), does not betray, holds in its talented arms miles of art that does not wish to be exposed to the light of the media, of people, of anyone, for that simplicity, modesty, Teutonic sense of work that does not seek applause, for a non-strategy that knows how to float among the shadows taking just enough oxygen to generate sound pills that smell of anaesthesia, in the apotheosis of whispers and suggestions that are often really practically invisible.

Mic Jogwer, Paul Richter and Luca Sammuri have reappeared, like splintered prey, like sonic cylinders in a day's work, with a suitcase full of history, geography, sociology and a diet that invites modern egoism to melt away. They explore the nooks and crannies of post-punk with increasing meticulousness, diminishing still further the imagination, the illuminations, silencing instinct and working, rather, on a few lines, on wide loops from which to draw the vitality they and we need. 

A mental orchestra invites the notes to be discreet, transparent, fierce, like ancient cannibals who know how to bite ankles: melancholy is not left alone, but accompanied by a vision that pushes for a human unity worthy of the philosophical school of the 1900s that, as chance would have it, came from another German city.

A record like a journey with a burlap sack on their shoulders, to harvest, to sow, to wait, to smile, never to make people cry, because that is not their job.

The claustrophobia of modern living enters the fog of obedient guitars, of dry drumming devoted to simplicity, with the bass remaining fond of Red Lorry Yellow Lorry for a carpet that, thanks to veiled keyboards, homogenises the intensity and erects it to the role of mental traffic light.

Uncomplicated but deep riffs sink in, Mic's singing is more and more a skeleton with wispy palpitations, irresistible and provocative, with his unmistakable accent to make us smile as a tender embrace. His words, however, are blades and thorns that never return to his throat....

The sound is an obscure contraption, a mystery that seeks the breadth of pop, coughing, taking from that aforementioned Leeds the poisonous particles of its factories, for a hypothetical bridge to Berlin, in order to sow an invisible territory of death and mourning.

The trio does not try to be convincing with songs full of variations, tricks and accesses full of excesses: they prefer a desert mode, with sun and moon, heat and cold and pain and little joy all packed into a few chords, achieving the result of being more convincing and able to become a mirror that is never tarnished.

The magic of the twelve compositions is all in the direction, in these gentle bullets with their lapels turned up, along with the perfect dose of poignant affirmations, in which the relationship between the self and others seems to be an almost silent film, to generate oscillating projections full of sweat and coughing: it incites fear, the right amount of unease and, if you pay attention, everything is perfectly positioned between the cold and detached mechanism and a generous emotional explosion.

The production gives the right continuity to the previous one, and in it it is very clear that the almost forty-year career offers us people who are very distant from their beginnings, but with the same propensity to make music a serious job and not a playground without specific care.

Fascination with them becomes the gymnasium of an intelligence that cannot have so many followers: they have always been ahead of the game and these tracks demonstrate, thanks to a vertical and never pompous framework, that they leave aside the ambitions of success, which is for them a useless event. This is understandable because they are eleven sentences, where nobody gets on their train but, really, believe me, it is preferable for the masses to avoid its tracks.

Many current bands grew up thanks to PTB and then preferred to stuff the richness of spirit with aesthetic beauty, the sterile kind.

Pink, blue and black: three colours placed in a row, like a logical cloak of belonging, with skin, sky and death wisely represented in these grooves.

All we can do is to bring our ears close to it and swallow joy and fear, as the only intelligent act...

Song by Song

1 - Follow Me

Crackling synths and melancholic guitar christen the album. And then a soul questions itself, searching for answers in the sky and in people for a song full of pain in transit, with the skin trembling in this electronic riff son of Kraftwerk and in the guitars full of the very dark light of this band in their early days. An invitation that is the muted response of those who adore this first track, as a good and just thing...

2 - Can't Do Without You

Here is the pop song, or rather, one that tries to enter a place the band never wanted to be a part of. It becomes a single, a glue generator between that genre and electronic indie, with the rhythm taking the form of a simple mantra on which the synth line rests.

3 - Dancing With Ghosts

Try to imagine a point in the sky where the guitar trajectories of The Mission and Red Lorry Yellow Lorry intersect. There it is: from here, a rainbow of liquid beauty with invocations, desires towards an essential metric that is typical for the Berliners. And it is amazement and joy in mixed dance.

4 - Fighting for the Right Side

How to translate claustrophobia into a calendar where the candles are extinguished and pushed by this bass to bring the voice to the walls wallpapered with a deep need for justice. Guitars absorbing glam, almost hard rock, brief moments and then it's decadent poetry to lead this piece to their podium whose space we can only wish to share.

5 - Why Can't We Just Move On

We find ourselves in the dark electro zone of Slow Readers Club, with Manchester calling to Berlin. A sonic grace is invaded by a paralysing sadness. And it's mantra like a genetic epilepsy spreading salt and honey....

6 - Black Swan (But I Know There's More to Life)

We are at the highest point, where the God of Flight loses his breath. An honest cry is born on these black-and-white keys, on the grey voice, on this swan that seems to fly between the walls of a lyric perfectly adjacent to the frustrations of a guitar that tries to scratch our breath, for a sensation of endless hypnotic damnation...

7 - Like We All Do

Every lightning bolt has an invisible opposing force: that's what happens in this sudden rush that reminds us of Belfegore, with that same impetus that chills the night. The crescendo of rock guitars (in the vicinity of Sonic Temple's Cult) induces us to a joy whose address we do not know but, like butterflies drugged with life, we will get there in a daze. And the mistakes of existence find a perfect bowl in this little urban jewel...

8 - Friday Night Out 

Deceptive chords precede a smoky, poisonous spit, with the memory of the first singles of Fields of the Nephilim (especially in the bass line and the ‘simplicity’ of the guitar), making this song the epitome of the evolution of the band from the German capital: everything here is poetic vision, in chiaroscuro, in a sinful state of warning for what could happen to us...

9 - Please Don't Ask Me Why 

Never oblivious to their debut album, the three of them unleash songs like drops of water full of memory. The track is a temporal embrace, a kiss to the temples and an invitation to read the life of feelings carefully. The voice becomes exhilarating, propaedeutic, recitative over the chilling vibrations of a six-string in a trance-like state...

10 - I Can Read Your Name in the Stars

Third episode in which the piano takes the stage: it is only the springboard for a series of words that know how to be a gentle sling, waiting for the thunder. Which arrives, gently, as if the whole thing were the basis of an unusual ballad, for a baritone approach forgotten in order to favour the inclination of a series of unexpected smiles...

11 - Stay for the Night

Glory must have a crown for all to see. One always closes a path with the infinite illuminating the past. That's what this song does, a sumptuous and perfect synthesis of a delinquent act of beauty that makes the congenital loop developed in three precise phases the spectacular amphitheatre of a sound reef that makes you weep in spite of everything. A dreamlike density, a sequence of references rendered subtle and almost hidden, but in these few notes chaos happens, its opposite, in an undulating alternation, with the heart of the piece showing the glimmers of its complexity when the drumming and synths fail. It is at that very moment that you realise the landslide zones that can produce this crazy track that closes the album and opens the heart towards a paranoid and irresistible desire to surround oneself with this magnetic addiction…

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

12 March 2025

https://pinkturnsblue.bandcamp.com/album/black-swan

ORDEN-RECORDS BERLIN - MusicBrainz

http://www.shamelesspromotionpr.com

My Review: The Dharma Chain -Nowhere

 

The Dharma Chain -Nowhere

Music continues to fly, to move, to disregard boundaries, treaties, and to run, walk and taste uninterrupted thrills of connection.

Such is the case with this Australian band who emigrated from their home country to Berlin and present their debut album. Exactly like their real life, their artistic life also demonstrates a willingness and ability to move into different zones, to delve with intelligence and perfectly oiled muscles into the most acerbic psychedelia, with the mighty flushes of garage rock and a slight inclination towards shoegaze, all with elegance and sensuality.

But there is also a vigorous, almost aggressive impetus, calmed by a truly remarkable maturity, aided by a production that enhances the edges and smooths them out perfectly. The compositions create a wide emotional, visual state, sealing the amalgam between dance and introspection, with moments of sweetness as in the case of Her Head, a mental vessel that sways between a guitar arpeggio and a powerful distortion, until accelerating while maintaining a dreamlike status.

When Clockwork arrives, one feels a strange joy: it will be given by the tension of an almost hallucinatory feedback, the murky bass and a guitar that sounds like a sitar in search of an embrace, or the two voices embracing. 

YSHK (You Should Have Known) is a gentle miter, leading to awareness thanks to unavoidable guitar on fire that could have come from the Bristol area of the early seventies, backed by heavenly synths.

The more you visit these songs, the greater the involvement, the more the experience drags the listener into becoming a distinct identity, with a rising body temperature as a gift, almost causing a pleasant feverish state.

When the electric lullaby of Somewhere arrives, everything becomes poetry with brushstrokes that make the clouds blue, in a dreamlike space that decisively shows the shoegaze dimension of the group, plunging us into new, emerging needs, with the handkerchief swelling with tender tears.

The apotheosis comes with Greenlight, the most intense and elaborate moment, a necklace of corals that seize the light and give themselves the depth of darkness, in a state of palpable and enveloping tension. Chaos is trained, led to reflection, first clean and then intoxicated by an excruciating guitar and the combination of bass and drums that seem to protect the words, delivering an undeniable jewel.  A resounding, intense debut, a remarkable propensity to make music that is nomadic, confrontational but also serene, marvelling and shaking the listener's mind. 

One is transported to the zone of curiosity, where everything expands and is in no hurry to define itself. A big hug to the band and an immense thank you: it is works like this that make the listener a privileged and resounding beneficiary of splendid ‘mild torture', defining the word delight in a new way…

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

20 Giugno 2024

https://anomicrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-dharma-chain-nowhere

My Review: The Halo Trees - Where The Deep Ends

 The Halo Trees - Where The Deep Ends

There are places in the soul that seem like silent deserts, waiting for a conversation that can convey companionship, exchange, vibration, determine a possible richness to annihilate the flood of uncertainty those places generate. In such a context The Halo Trees could be all that, a support and presence to generate footholds and a different meaning for one's existence. The band hails from Berlin and incorporates a hypothetical bridge with England, Australia and the United States, as their visual and sonic imagery involves a suitcase constantly full of longings, curiosity and above all melancholy, the feeling that resides in every part of the world, and in the specific case because their music seems to come out of movie soundtracks from the three aforementioned countries and makes the whole thing amalgamated and perfect.   The mystery, the penumbra, the delicacy, the hinted and never devastating power, the asking of questions by making curiosity a starting point, are elements that come out like an autumn rain from these ten compositions, which turn into seeds in the atrium of the heart and the head, to oxygenate with reality and wisdom our boundless exaggerations, since wisdom, balance and poetry are the trademark of the quartet from the German capital. The ductility in visiting different musical genres is amazing but even more so is the fact that their style is confirmed, and this recognizability becomes their passport, to confirm that uniqueness that is often, instead, lost in these cases.  Uncertainty, confusion, the drudgery of living, presence, the will to know how to manoeuvre words, the insecurity of excessive information that destabilizes, the three-dimensionality of things are some of the topics that the skillful Sascha Blach knows how to address, for a sonic combination that hypnotizes by precision, in a mental rather than physical dance that definitely conquers. One experiences ecstatic paralysis with the baritone voice, that approach that often reminds us of Stuart A. Staples with his Tindersticks and Liam Mckahey and the Cousteau.

But to generate a list of comparisons is debasing, unnecessary: in this album we are faced with a deep belonging to pride aimed at presenting uniqueness and difference. One often feels the need to embrace these compositions because one immediately feels the debt to the beauty, richness and benefit that listening generates, to enter fairy tales in which the end does not come because of their ability to permeate everything at the foot of heaven, where everything begins and nothing dies...  One weeps since in this musical cylinder the atmosphere becomes a refuge, as well as a delicious dirty sweetness to be kept segregated in the depths of one's considerations. The production manages to make perfect the high stylistic figure of the writing, a glue, a shield, a protection towards these ten tears with a smile that make Where The Deep Ends a screen to keep the right distance from what oppresses. Songs that clear the air of polluted atoms and suspend it, as in a fairy tale that switches from fantasy style to noir, to legitimize their thirst for exposure. 

They cross decades, knocking on the door of memory as well as that of a future they know how to tease, to lay brick upon brick, without forgetting the objectivity of the deception of living.

The depth and wise decision to arrange the songs with a methodology reminiscent of classical music gives the whole an intoxicating fragrance. Each instrument seems to shoulder the reception of that which lends mystery and a great evocative expression: it can be the violin as well as the use of synths that stun with quality and precision in a remarkable balancing act.  As suggested in the lyrics of the final song, we are guests, but more importantly, witnesses to a quality that is out of the ordinary, and it is astonishing how the group, with the third album, imparts a sense of the continuous need for listening, to become a blotting paper, to enter into a contract with addiction, a drug that is not addictive but beneficial.  

Listening turns into journeys where slowness generates the extension of imagination, the internalization and projection of images that emerge elegantly from stories that are written to become our chance to mate with magic...

So whether it's Alt-Pop, Post-Punk, Progressive, Alternative we don't care and that's not why we can love them: we will be constantly devoted to their being a black and white cinematic film, able to ridicule our fake colors by making this album govern and discipline us, giving their art the sceptre of command...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

5th June 2024

COP International

https://thehalotrees.bandcamp.com/album/where-the-deep-ends-album-2024

My Review: L’appel Du Vide - Metro

L’appel Du Vide - Metro

Look! Saxony, one of the federated states of Germany, presents us with four of its emissaries of beauty from the astonishing Chemnitz, famous for its statue portraying Karl Marx, but for Old Scribe above all for the numerous bands that have made it a secret cradle of countless splendours.

Four years of activity have shown that the pelvic and mental treatise of this combo is a radioactive stain of surgical propensity, an epidermal shock that goes beyond the musical genres on offer, between an almost Deathrock, a confident Post-Punk and a sublime Noise Rock mixed with candelabra to illuminate the torpor and suffering of the city that has never managed to invade the world, but which next year will see as European Capital of Culture.

This work is a process of combustion, thoroughbred horses thrown into a gallop to leap over obstacles filled with banality and vulgarity: the Germans here employ rational and emotional strategies, a pick, a spade, a chisel and a lathe, to make listeners aware of what it is to be a reject of society.

A continuous uproar, in the celestial watershed of confusions made palpable, with dutiful precision, taking care of the sound, its outrageous and swaggering rules, to slaughter consciences more than eardrums, for a crazy world tour, encompassing the United States (the overflowing Portland above all), as well as the strong Manchester in England, to arrive at the intuition of the qualification of melodies as witches resurrected after a long hibernation, to bestow fatuous fires and handfuls of incense inside our nostrils.

Something primitive, the fruit of pre-medieval charcoal conquests seize the bloodstream of these compositions, to materialise in the modern proscenium of insult, in the wandering dance behind its scenes. 

It becomes clear that their ambassadorship has the will to progress, to leave its core and become an affront, a clash, through songs that wander the sky like murky clouds in a successful attempt to make the sun's rays weep: when iron flies in the sky, no heaven feels safe.

In the eyes of the four metalworkers, the history of man is a cemetery to be carried in the fragrance of their faces, a puzzle of Machiavellian ardour, the arrogance that reigns and conquers, deconstructs and amplifies the pain starting from punk and ending up stuck inside movements full of spasms and fireworks, in the chaos of an irrepressible adrenalin.

It drools in terrifying mode, tangles in a spasm that hurts the head, with continuous stings, relegating pleasure to the dead theatre of illusion. Songs like gratings full of blood, microscopic attacks that with the passing minutes become a nuclear roar against a peace that they just don't care about: once again the Old Scribe turns his cheek to this mysterious and rebellious group, offering himself as a sacrificial victim, conscious and happy.

The rhythm, often murderous in its corrosive speed, carries itself along with bass lines, blades of shattering guitars, the vulgar and extraordinary drumming, seductive altar of every physical pick.

When the piano and synthesizers dare to show their breaths, we give in to an unexpected heart attack: like druids without respect they play with our senses, spewing forth courses of extraordinary and at the same time alienating beauty, where commotion genuflects.

Suse, Friday, Flatty and Rene: these are the names of these furious little guns who composed a treatise on madness that the Frankfurt School, with its extraordinary philosophers, would have rewarded with a degree in applied alienation, with an academic kiss.

Enough is enough, it is undeniable that we have to reckon with the individual cracks and move into a getsemane waiting to be breathed, amidst more weeping olive trees than ever before...

Song by Song

1 - Nacht

The opening is a heart attack, Sheffield seems resurrected, and then it's a tangle that starts with The Killing Joke as it glides into Frisco, and loses its free will to be the gymnasium where everything has to be precise, with monumental and rapid changes of rhythm, and a vocal that is dry, symptomatic and abrasive.

2 - Verschwiegen

Primordial seeds of arthritis-filled vapours coming from Fields Of The Nephilim become apparent in the first few seconds. Then it's savagery, barbaric and atomic disembowelment, backed by magmatic guitars and Rene showing us the breath of Rozz Williams. 

3 - Offenbarungseid

Wounded Post-Punk, following Bauhaus as they put makeup on their faces, takes off to attack our already clearly wounded bodies. Everything becomes a locomotive full of mental refugees, enraged, embracing the unforgiving guitar: it rips, sews, paints vessels dripping with sweat and sticky jelly. The breath is short, but a stratospheric black joy is experienced....

4 - Woanders

Here is the alien Germany, blameless, majestic, elusive, that makes us wait, with the play of guitars and drums, to become stake and heartbreak. The time oscillates between 1977 and 1980, the places are the vertebrae of London and Detroit, in a Post-Punk party of incredible placebo effect

5 - Verbrennen

The Banshees open the dances, then it is the majestic corpse of the band, its uniqueness, that emerges: a song that is a procession, an armistice, a surrender that knows darkness when the singing begins and the drumming becomes sombre. Then just debris and fans falling to the ground...

6 - Fleisch

The head bows, the eyes search for treatises on ancient medicine, the notes fall from the sky like slow, dust-filled skeletons, in a slow industrial spectrum that turns into a hard-core murder of inhuman chorality, to arrive, following a treatise on imposed education, to play with Deathrock missiles and then, again and again, flow into hard-core. Devastating!

7 - Warteschleife

No truce, for pity's sake, you don't, you mustn't, and the four of them beat up, they don't give a damn about common sense, and continue to sow bullets, in the chaotic Dantesque circle, placing zombies in the sounds and malignant smiles in the harmonic textures...

8 - Ausgeliefert

Berlin calls, Hamburg cries, Bremen swings, Frankfurt waits: a song that, like a super condensed book, struggles to contain the sparkle of these black seeds like gloating worms. It yearns, it waits, it enriches, it warms the skin of sound in a dance that makes a mop of every thought...

9 - Fragezeichen

The delirium, with the first part of the song reiterating a neurotic and shadowy methodology, the surprise of a stratospheric finale, with that piano that kills every caress, makes the leave-taking a new epidermic shock, with the story of the first and blasphemous Post-Punk that emerged from the banks of the Mississippi, then able to penetrate into the heart of the German black forest. A delirium that sums up everything we have heard and makes this album a spectral mirror of clamorous urges and macabre, powerful beauties...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

28th March 2024

Album out on 29th March 2024

https://sabotagerecords.bandcamp.com/album/lappel-du-vide-metro-lp