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

My Review: Swirlpool - Distant Echoes

 

Swirlpool - Distant Echoes

The time has come for conjugation, for memory to activate its channels full of intelligence and respect in order to probe the past and give it new possibilities for a more conscious future. 

This is done through a German band, its passion for shoegaze, magically delving into the river of reverberations, of feelings that shake the listener's soul, who finds himself immersed in candelabra, shadows, winds, suspended magic, between black and white and shaded, between sonic thickenings and poignant melodies, where melancholy stamps its passport to bring these songs onto the stage of the most complex and robust emotion one could wish for. 

In the meticulous sifting that sees this genre of music concentrated in its (at least here) thirty-four years of life, everything appears synthesised to perfection and then given a tailspin and loaded with new pulsations, new attitudes, new inclinations, in order to give this nursery of controlled incandescence a throne: it would be important for it to be recognised, as Distant Echoes is one of those works that make history. Within it, clichés are exalted, through the methodology of study, and then a necessary motion of new stars is developed. An attitude that explores, almost secretly, the hunting grounds of lesser-known post-rock, injecting seeds of subtle, almost mystical indie-rock. The whole produces a set of poems that give guitars like magnets, a soft but capable bass that supports the entire sound apparatus, and drumming that traces full-bodied melodies, a vigilant that launches sound and rhythm in the right directions. 

You run, you fly, you chase the centre of gravity of a desire that knows no calculation: the professionalism of Thomas A. Fischer, Markus Kraus and Christian Atzinger produces spells, daisy petals full of ardour and the ability to explore light. They favour the song form, but it is as if each part of their compositions had individual projects, for a puzzle of absolute beauty. Each moment is a bubble that plunges into the rainbow of electric waves that know how to skilfully combine reality and dream, making us touch the notes like an unexpected miracle. An album that seems to be written to be listened to in an attic, with a few glasses of wine, some sweets and a psychology book: there is life to be touched in these rivers, each track becomes a stick that slips into the water of a concept made of vibrations, tensions and caresses, to trigger reflections and emotions. It leads us to crisply perceive a protean layer, causing adoration and disbelief, against the backdrop of the subliminal chaos of shoegaze painted and not shouted, through modes predominantly set to the right rhythm, with a predilection for rhythm changes. Arpeggios with a burning heart, directions that are never random towards a melody that is never found in solitude, with a teamwork that compacts the voice full of reverberation with music swollen with inventiveness, for a global creation that engages the listener in deep attention. 

The production by Mark Gardener (Ride) comforts, amazes, giving the further certainty that this debut was born to be protected with wisdom and intelligence. It flows, and does so well, this magnetic flow of brushes and silks, to envelop the heart in unquestionable ecstasy. 

Right from the start, with the album's title song, we have majesty and shyness, for a combo that hands over the sceptre to the guitars and drumming, and in which post-rock embraces the easiest shoegaze to listen to, in a blaze of intensity and warmth. In Caught In A Dream the band shows how melody and power can be an invincible duo, with the vocals sounding like a rainy day without smiles, while the keyboard paints possible rainbows and the guitars alternate between Dream Pop and shoegaze patterns. When Paranoia arrives, we realise where the style brought to the sky stage by Slowdive is placed: is a sombre procession that does not forgo sweetness with guitars that watch The Cure's Wish album show wrinkles. Immense. The concluding Drowned Voices is an almost mystical farewell, immersed in its slowness that hypnotises, fascinates and shows the future of this musical genre: it is a grazing of the intensity of a sound that is shown with modesty, as if nothing should be ostentatious, and it is at this juncture that the band unleashes solutions with patience and research.             

The whole soundstage deserves a precise study: it will not be the best-loved album of 2024, but certainly among those that will prove that it is the students who teach the world that there is still so much to know...

Prodigiously, while the vibrant artistic forms exhibit their structure, everything seems to become evanescent: one cannot control the beauty of this pelvic carousel of balances, one can only 'suffer' its fascination, in an ever-rising merry-go-round of sounds. And the dirt of guitars trained to contortions produces an unsuspected sense of cleanliness: when sound slides wash the soul and you feel lighter...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

20 March 2024

Album out on 22 March 2024

https://swirlpoolmusic.bandcamp.com/album/distant-echoes

My Review: Diesein - Even the best are the worst

Diesein - Even the best are the worst

Who are the best at making electropop a matter of discipline, elevating it to a form of culture? The Germans, did you doubt it?

Here, in these very grooves, we can celebrate the beauty of the sax accompanying the electronic feathers, in a design of warm and sensual dance in which musical decades take stock. There is balancing to be done, mechanisms to be registered, a melodic strategy to be determined that never ceases to tease. The Diesein are completely unknown masters and this angers the old scribe not a little: stick to these frequencies, history is written by those who have not won and they are the emblem of this. Their hands use a skilful ladle, ingredients are thrown into the pot that also includes drops of synthpop held at bay with balance. The drum machine's work is perfectly aligned with that of a bass guitar that is extreme in its simplicity and allows the synths to dominate the scene without being ridiculed. You keep Depeche Mode that scribe right now, with these very songs, we know that beauty doesn't reach the masses and fanaticism...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

7th July 2023

https://diesein.bandcamp.com/album/even-the-best-are-the-worst

My Review:Die Letzten Ecken - Talisman

Die Letzten Ecken - Talisman

Berlin insists, it churns out bands and works as if it were a river in a perpetual state of birth. A city that shapes and informs the world, has huge arms that know how to encircle restlessness, loneliness, mystery, sows dense fluids of gentle weed, like the one present in the nine songs. A journey through the history of that capital, an advance within the intensity of rhythms, of sounds, of perceptions that make the human being increasingly aware. The synthesisers are mighty waves, to form houses as if they were dance halls, in which one feeds on electronics, on Kraut Rock (could it and should it have been missing? Certainly not!), ending up oxygenating Post-Punk, making it an obedient slave. The glass shatters, as do the balances, and one travels hopelessly upset by this cleverly diluted Dark-Electro pile-up. Their massive intelligence definitively emerges with the fourth arrow, the Zirkus, which elevates their concept, behaviour and poise, as it can compress the file of that place and, once the pen drive is removed, everything remains memorised. One experiences moments of elegant cybernetic poetry (Brennender Kummer), in which the female voice presses to become a dry recitation. And when you get to listen to Talisman, you enter the eighties as if it were a Spin-Off of an eventual film about that decade.

Don't hesitate: go to Germany and get a vitamin boost with this wonderful trio, because you'll be just fine...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Supino

30th April 2023

https://billotontraeger.bandcamp.com/album/die-letzten-ecken-talisman

My Review: Tulips - Tangled In Transition

 Tulips - Tangled In Transition

Certain music should be listened to on days of subtle rain, when the preoccupation with the force of nature does not offer tension and difficulty. Let us then delve into the most authentic Cologne, capable of offering relief and beauty permeated with consequential boiling reflections.

The Tulips are a hidden heritage, Unesco sometimes makes blunders: it should protect the German band, which with this EP has generated an uproar and a lesson in sounds and attitudes, throwing the past to the wayside, because these guys have changed and improved everything known about this kind of music. A form that grows from the epidermis, fast, rises to the sky, aided by the thrust of the bass and synths, the true rulers of these structures that seem to release toxins on repeat. An electrifying emotional state makes the compositions worthy of being considered a short but intense tale for a reading that becomes idyllic, especially for those with slight torments inside their minds...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Supino

30th April 2023

https://ttuulliippss.bandcamp.com/album/tangled-in-transition?from=search&search_item_id=131200194&search_item_type=a&search_match_part=%3F&search_page_id=2572967728&search_page_no=1&search_rank=1&search_sig=f79d22fd2bc7d2872f88750a3e12f441

My Review: Assassun - Chronic Quicksand Depression Morning

 Assassun - Chronic Quicksand Depression Morning

Vlimmer is a wide-ranging, dazzling musical project capable of agglomerating the most diverse listeners. But its leader Alexander Leonard Donat presents his second work under the Assassun acronym: after last year's Sunset Skulls, the Berlin artist accelerates his impetus and catapults us into an electric merry-go-round that brings his beloved Post-Punk to a standstill, to make room for Elektro Punk formulas bathed in perfectly compatible EBM drops, for a result of excellent expansion of a sonic journey that encompasses all the depth of the author's never-stopping. Listening to it is a gentle bombardment of beats and shadowy circuits in search of melodies that know how to keep curiosity high: a perfectly successful experiment!

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Supino

28th April 2023

https://blackjackilluministrecords.bandcamp.com/album/chronic-quicksand-depression-morning?from=search&search_item_id=2248644066&search_item_type=a&search_match_part=%3F&search_page_id=2569465709&search_page_no=0&search_rank=1&logged_in_menubar=true