My Review: Deus Ex Lumina - Fight Black

 Deus Ex Lumina - Fight Black

Being born in Buenos Aires, moving to Berlin.

Playing in several bands and then wanting a solo project and succeeding.

Gonzalo Schwindt is the protagonist here, and his music is a gothic-tipped pyramid with an EBM heart at its core: He moves through musical genres as easily as he drinks some liquor. For a result that is danceable ecstasy, with Dark-Synthpop veins like trees surrounding his cottage, situated well into the nineties. Determined, with a good taste that is now rare when it comes to these artistic situations, his is a track that succeeds in disconcerting for the softness of the parts that slip into black pleasure, fighting with cloaks that defeat the ignorance of the opponent on duty. He throws down the gauntlet and Gonzalo succeeds, because everything settles in the brain like a pleasant torment, surely winning when an average listener would compare the song to Andrew Eldritch of Sisters Of Mercy, especially in the refrain: guilty ignorance! We are in different areas, with different designs. All you have to do is dance and wear a dream armed with strength too, because Black must sooner or later leave this world...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

26th March 2023

https://deusexlumina.bandcamp.com/track/fight-back

My Review: Yakima Jera - Capture

Yakima Jera - Capture

The shock of seeing Nature only at night puts the mind in a straitjacket: the proponents of this prodigy are Yakima Jera, Germans by nationality but inhabitants of the sacred monsters of the craggy terrain of the Bavarian forest that gives them souls to lust after, to hurt, to kill. Coldwave-kissing rhythms with heavy drumming, Darkwave guitars with burr on the strings, and keyboards lend themselves to making Minimal Wave an obedient slave. Six black nuggets pulled from the woods lead our ears to be attacked by magnetic violence, from which there is no escape. Nice and unnerving to smile as legs bleed and the mind sees reflections of 80s Manchester knocking like a pleasant nightmare. The vocals are a shameless Goddess: she nods and throws us to the floor.

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

22nd March 2023

https://yakimajera.bandcamp.com/album/capture

My Review: Worn Out - The Unknown Demo

 Worn Out - The Unknown Demo

Can you imagine a melody with Gothic fingerprints emerging dazed but happy from a psychiatric visit by a German band?

The result can be found inside The Unknown Demo, four swaggering Post-Punk raids full of Darkwave attitude, which are the obvious form of atonement for the sins of many individuals and which Worn Out have summed up and explained in these intense tracks, with guaranteed emotion, while the body, dancing, bounces through the dust of sadnesses beautifully stitched together.

They sing of loneliness, of paths of unavoidable damage, of screams and drowned souls, of unfinished letters, while the music acts as an altar, an invocation, a jolt, a basin to welcome extinguished spirits. 

To feel enveloped by these atmospheres is to find continuity with what one has always loved: those who are predisposed to this kind of music smile while holding a skeleton in their hands. Worn Out have written four icy wedges and thrown in our expectations, because in these parts joy is grey leading to black, irresistible...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

18th March 2023

https://wornoutwave.bandcamp.com/album/the-unknown-demo

My Review: Her Absence Fill the World - Neon Arabesque

 Her Absence Fill the World - Neon Arabesque

It's time to take a look at a Culture that is breathing its last breaths, a culture that can no longer go around the world sowing itself in minds which are increasingly atrophied by consumerism and the haste to possess nothingness and lives as if only it were the whole that certifies the meaning of existences. To do this, we use a thematic work which is also able to involve the expressive mode of perfectly successful incursions of musical genres within that electronic music that manages to be as effective as rock once was. A couple living in Berlin assume the responsibility of showing a projectuality that leads the listener to have elements to inhabit consciousness again. They dance (who can deny that one can think with the body in motion) with experimental journeys of Dark Electro and Synthwave up to the gates of Ebm fragments, which make the concepts and elaborations expressed more massive. Synths like landslides of snow searching for ice but finding warmth, ending up in the valley of our thoughts: this Ep is melancholic poetry, on a sad sunny day. One of the most expressive voices of the last few years, a black eagle descended to the city to slice our skin with its singing and to grab our hearts, capable of gliding on the low register with grace and sensuality, then taking flight on the high one, leaving in its wake tears that come out of electronic exercises which are a trip in which we lose oneself in order to regain lucidity. The Ep shows its muscles, but always with that willingness to grant bodily movement access boundaries, so as not to know too much sadness. Among the most fascinating works of 2022, Neon Arabesque is destined to remain a pill that will not dissolve, but will continue to have a great solidity within those who listen to it carefully.

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

16th March 2023

https://detritirecords.bandcamp.com/album/her-absence-fill-the-world-neon-arabesque

My Review: Xenia Beliayeva - Words

 Xenia Beliayeva - Words

Yes, the old scribe does not leave Hamburg, but believe me he is not wrong, because listening to Xenia Beliayeva's single is a delirium that everyone should experience.

Her voice, with a vocal that is a scratch of salt amidst the indecisive sun rays of the German city, is what can shake us and make us understand perfectly how Synth can colour communication with words that precede the actual words, which here offer an essay of her skills as a visionary in search of a place to take our fears. These lexical expressions are the next step to complete the intention of having her in our listening, dancing in the desire to finally understand what fabric these syllables we surround and feed on are made of. A song that bewitches and frightens, making it perfect and full of toned and swaggering muscles. All under the banner of a perfect production (in Germany we don't joke, never, we have only to learn from this Mother Nation of Sound and Professionalism), which allows the stylistic factory of Synthwave, Industrial-Techno, Synthpop to let the blood flow contentedly to intoxicate our legs with a dance that is light in appearance...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

10th March 2023

https://xeniabeliayeva.bandcamp.com/track/words

My Review: Billy Zach - A Momentary Bliss

 

Billy Zach - A Momentary Bliss

The Hamburg worshipped by the old scribe is back, in a powerful, overbearing, perfect, unequivocal way, through a band that is a prodigy to spread, not to do so would be a mortal offence, given the talent, dedication, skill and propensity to write sheets of musical notes full of eye-popping scratches.

Nine sabre-rattling, nine croaky-sounding factories, nine punches in the stomach, with the style of those who wear genius to deny the distance between those who really are and those who cannot even dream of it.

An excellent record, nervous, full of thorns, spits, kicks, complex but simply perfect for enjoying its compounds that melt into our thoughts and our legs dancing like splinters without consciousness. The songs do it all beautifully, connecting and disconnecting emotional tension, showing how Post-Punk and Noise have something to share, a dialogue that reveals flames of enjoyment and annihilates Alternative's attempts to try and eat from the same plate. 

One gets the distinct feeling that the band's central nervous system is tuned up with the desire to demonstrate how others, who are succeeding, perhaps do not possess this range of sonic, compositional possibilities, where the balance between talent and design ends in a nice draw. There are no tracks to be preferred but a continuous listening, an eating of German lead on days of fatigue...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

10th March 2023

https://lapochettesurpriserecords.bandcamp.com/album/a-momentary-bliss

My Review: Some Ember - Held a Fragment of the Moon

 Some Ember - Held a Fragment of the Moon

Take an American from Oakland and bring him to Berlin: something intriguing is bound to happen, come on, let's not kid ourselves, two great acts cohabiting is good news.

Two singles and two Ep's later we find ourselves talking about the third Ep, Held a Fragment of the Moon, which is a satanic Synthwave monolith, biting and not fleeing, residing in its electronic programs, hurling itself into the Darkwave with delightful lightness, while the rhythms pulsate and you are transported into the stiletto heels of the dancing night. Refined, generous, romantic, but always rhythmic, the songs on the Ep are an imaginative portal to what has happened and is happening in those musical territories. Just as a book of poetry placed in the sand remains so, so does this work: however much you deny it, it will emerge...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

28th February 2023

https://someember.bandcamp.com/album/held-a-fragment-of-the-moon?from=search&search_item_id=910108731&search_item_type=a&search_match_part=%3F&search_page_id=2455117289&search_page_no=0&search_rank=1&logged_in_menubar=true

My Review: Isolationsgemeinschaft - Der Tanz geht weiter!

 Isolationsgemeinschaft - Der Tanz geht weiter!

The power of dancing on autopilot: you don't have to pay attention to anything, just be a jet of muscle in the air, flying and dispelling all worries.

Making us become exactly that is the irresistible electronics of the German duo Isolationsgemeinschaft, who have descended to planet Earth to take us back to theirs: an ordered chaos of sounds coming from the satellites of Uranus, the Greek God of the sky. And it is there that we become glacial dancers in evolution. Starting with DA.F., the two surely thought that nothing should be forgotten, that it is legitimate to steal only what is good and perfect, and I would say that the operation was perfectly successful. 

Loops of microchips thrown into the absent mind produce sweat and metal in the muscles: when the Ebm pushes on the accelerator the Minimal Synth is absent, when the tracks get slower the Coldwave shows its chest, proudly.

A truly worthwhile album, majestic and never out of time.

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

27th February 2023

https://isolationsgemeinschaft.bandcamp.com/album/der-tanz-geht-weiter

My Review: Luftschloss - Kollektion

 Luftschloss - Kollektion

All the mystery in the world is found in this German band, capable of minimising any kind of accessibility: all it needs is its music that contemplates fury and investigation, in a set of productions that are always of the highest level. You have, in this case, a collection of tearful but robust flashes, twists and tensions in abundance, in the monastery where the divinity of darkness is prayed to, the emptiness that fills nothingness, whose futility they celebrate with Postpunk gushes intoxicated by the attraction to the emotional sphere of Darkwave. Bass and guitar are the reigning gods, but the support of keyboard and drums is remarkable and necessary. The songs give us the measure of dissatisfaction, of unease, of a fracture that leads to incommunicability. It is metallurgical fascination, it is therapy that wounds and does not heal: Luftschloss is an unmissable appointment, where everyone looks to England, you would get a more concrete and real mapping of a nation that has created and developed like no other, and this band is proof of that.

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

22nd February 2023

https://luftschloss1.bandcamp.com/album/kollektion

My Review: Saline Grace - The Whispering Woods

 Saline Grace - The Whispering Woods

A journey without wind, rain, sand and hail cannot show the true face of places.

When music brings them into our eyes, then we can claim to at least feel their reality, to be part of them.

The Germans Saline Grace, with their fourth album, do exactly that, arousing the dishevelled amazement of the old scribe: songs like maps, like morphological reliefs, like stories that physicise landscapes and human beings, giving them enormous, surprising powers, in a movement that enriches the inestimable value of the sound elements and more.

Filled with fluctuating, magical atmospheres, like a photograph that comes to life and descends from paper to act as a cicerone within human affairs, this work enhances the unquestionable talents of a band devoted to description, to the sharing of secrets always capable of measuring the deepest aspects of living. It is a journey made of dense cultural references, of dilations of thought within the effervescence of the delicate magic of compositions that make musical art the queen of imagination but also of concreteness.

The Berlin band, led by Ricardo Hoffmann's baritone voice, sounds like an endless orchestra of flashes, thunderbolts, dewy shivers on the skin of the heart, a set of musical instruments borrowed from classical music to give the melody a psychedelic feeling within a folk structured to become an intimate film projected in the living room of one's mind. The dark and gothic areas of this work have nothing to do with the sensory exaggeration of what are the specific characteristics of those musical genres, but better demonstrate their existence in the human journey.

Between a folk masked by glitter with a sad smile and the rich imagery of a Nick Cave coming out of an analytical therapy, the album brings together different stylistic methods to arrive at the top of a hill: what one sees is a skilful predisposition to nuances, to descriptions of the motions of thought circumscribed within a quiver that is placed on the stage of perfection.

And here it is that slowness, so forgotten and guiltily abandoned by men (and which becomes, thanks to the German band, the reference point to circumstantiate their artistic project), brings everything to life in this attitude of taking time, and this is the primary condition to underline the greatness of this work. 

You dream, you weep, you cuddle your heart, while the songs write an emotional furrow with no boundary but tons of awareness, swinging between the leaves that as they move reveal the truth of existence. A record that shakes, blesses, reveals, shakes fragility in order to console and calm it with a long, tender embrace.

Everything seems to spring from woods, cellars, shelters and the sandpaper of thoughts that seek a story to tell: The Whispering Woods is a gondola trip through all this, between the impossible, chaos and discipline that meet, establish a pact for a healthy coexistence, and end up astounding all our senses...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

20 February 2023

https://salinegrace.bandcamp.com/album/the-whispering-woods

My Review: Götterdämmerung - Intensity Zone

Götterdämmerung - Intensity Zone

The old scribe would like to live in Berlin: it's OK if he doesn't, he can always have that desire. And it’s true that the music in that city is overflowing with all sorts of precision, as it’s dispersion is collected and used. This also happens in music and in the case of this band and the work in question I would say it is a perfect example to specify the thought.

A dirty, heavy, multi-directional, swaggering album with a sound that is rarely seen nowadays. Because the album is pure enjoyment: musical genres are ripped to shreds (Deathrock above all), revitalising them, painting them opaque black. Giving space to emanations of lysergic gas in the episodes that seem less devoted to extreme speed. Guitars with an evidently warm timbre, distorted but just the right amount, and drums that would make the devil smile as malignant as they are, are the queens of these songs also infected with a Gothic Rock veneer that fits well with the lyrics and the dimension of compact strength that is meant to be a completely successful act of conviction. Perfection passes this way....

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

14th February 2023

https://gotterdammerung.bandcamp.com/album/intensity-zone

My Review: Coloured Tears - Everything reminds me of you

 Coloured Tears - Everything reminds me of you  

What is attraction? Where does it lead us? What makes us lose, rightly so, of useless things? Questions that sow wisdom are never enemies. They only need caresses and closeness.

Listen to the album by André Grafert, the German artist who chose the name Coloured Tears for his intriguing project: six waves full of melodies and lightness between melancholy and tenderness. Thirty-eight years after the beginning of his career, here comes his stylistic and qualitative culmination with an album that, spanning musical genres with which he has grown, has managed to put his signature against a gathering of irresistible songs. Sensuality runs through every second (a Bryan Ferry discussing suffering and remedies with David Sylvian), along with the feeling that he can make his voice an emotional portal with simplicity, without frills. Also endowed with immense capabilities is the music, a blend of Synthpop polite not to disturb and not to seek applause, but rather attention and respect. 

The guitars, however, appear and are faithful butlers of the tiny work that ultimately serves to appreciate the whole. Perhaps there is a darkwave soul somewhere, and if there is, in its mystery perhaps it is hidden so as not to take too much credit, because everything slips away perfectly within a feeling that these are songs with a pop soul put on the sill, to be displayed with harmony and sensitivity. To top it all off: a record like this is a gift to keep in bed, you have to give it attention and sleep with it, in perfect solitude...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

12 Febbraio 2023

https://colouredtears.bandcamp.com/album/everything-reminds-me-of-you

My Review: NEW DEUTSCHE FOLK MUSIC - Vol 1 Rauhnaschtsweise

NEW DEUTSCHE FOLK MUSIC - Vol 1 Rauhnaschtsweise

Music produce resilience, intentional, representative, avant-garde in any case, in the face of those who will hear things already known.

And yet.

And yet this compilation from the energetic, swaggering, wonderful German label House of Inkantation, is adept at being all that and more. What is shown on this disc is a deep exploration into the woods and its inhabitants, into the symbolic circuits of a relationship with mystery that, through Neo Folk and its currents, succeeds in taking stock of the situation, bringing us awareness, emotion and the immense possibility of opening our eyes and seeing, not just looking.

Then we will realise that we are in front of a map of sound, of genres, of life with its emotional operations, bustle and calm in a partnership that, while on the one hand would seem impossible, on the other hand turns out to be an absolute triumph. 

Neo Folk - Neo Ambient - Death Folk - Black Metal: yes, these are some of the sonic virgins that show their skin, but identity must be found by listening that knows how to go beyond appearances. All bands have left their breath in the grooves, where guitars, especially acoustic ones, are the black angels spying, noting and bringing back to us those worlds that we normally don't consider much. Far from catharsis or emotional explosions: here we are in a place that by revealing itself favours our mutation, a cognitive bow that brings us closer and indoctrinates us towards a different knowledge.

They are ballads, they are bursts, they are lines of earth on our wrinkles, they are harmonies that shift the cognition of time and make us become inhabitants without a roof, naked perennials like those who live in those places where the concept of home does not exist. 

A majestic compilation, which dares to show the sky lowering and exhibiting slow comets, shimmering in the darkness that instead of covering reveal. Many tracks have been created especially for this compilation and others are unreleased, for a result that is shocking: all connected, devoted to what the old scribe tried to imply. What the hell is the point of having the shameless desire to entrust everything to taste is beyond comprehension: it is what happens and what asks to be considered that counts.

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

29th January 2023

https://houseofinkantation.bandcamp.com/album/neue-deutsche-folksmusik-vol-i-rauhnachtsweisen

My Review: Left for Pleasure - Human Contract

 My Review:

Left For Pleasure - Human Contract

Germany 

Synthwave - Darkwave - Postpunk 

Once upon a time there was an abundance of musical genres, a constant bustle of new discoveries, which created astonishment, assimilation and joy as a consequence, and then turned into parents capable of generating multiple births.

But what hurts the old scribe most is the lack of sound research, its development and a precise stylistic position.

Everything is flattened, equal and boring: digital, musical ignorance and disinterest in a serious and professional approach has done the rest.

There are exceptions, and one of them is this German band (look, what a coincidence, right?), which arrives after four singles on its long-distance debut.

And it is dawn, spring, joy, circular seduction, within atmospheres laden with sadness, controlled agitation, shedding of quick-setting tears.

Then these sounds: let happiness be given a portion of the sky and us the task of a respectful bow. 

Let's take a closer look at where they come from and what makes them such an interesting band.

Halle is a city with a troubled, difficult history that is also little talked about musically: it would seem to be forced to turn in on itself because places that are too important and famous are close to it (Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig), perhaps taking away the visibility it deserves.

With a Gothic cathedral that is well worth visiting as the reviewer did in 1997, this town has created jobs with the chemical industry. 

And it is the latter that has generated fear, desolation, surrender, frustration as the two Germans have managed to demonstrate with this sublime musical exercise.

We are faced with structures that wander through precisely conceived sonic spaces, stimulating references and entrances to circuits of asbestos dust which falls within robust movements, desolate, abandoned heavens to specify the vividness of human mediocrity.

The duo's minds become laboratories of images, obstinacies, voluminous discharges of wilted flowers, where everything necessarily makes itself capable of impregnating bleakness, to lead it, back to the wall, to the consequent shooting.

Synthesizers dominate, in the turbid flight of shortness of breath that is positioned here as the last obstacle before death.

Vocals come from both members of the band, capable of stimulating seductive suggestions, in the dutifully depressing exercise which enhances the quality of music that is enveloping, rigid, robotic and able to lead us to limb-bending dances. 

Arteries are filled with a certified ability to propagate an artistic frenzy with sound dominating the structure of the compositions: one continually travels back and forth in time, a bonfire that is frozen by Coldwave imprints which are cleverly almost hidden, as with certain Ebm fragments. 

One finds the immense aptitude to change rhythms, giving the preposed section considerable range, making it easier for the melodic textures to rage on our enraptured listening. And it is a perfect marriage by associations of necessity that take root song after song: only in splendid musical Germany such an intense and deflagrating album could be born. There is no need for distortion to feel the sky crashing down on us: the two take it with their black fingers and bring it down, generating din and lightning in our quivering hearts.

The atmospheres sound like multiple flocks in a gathering at the end of existence: something deeply sacred gushes from the compositions to certify the absence of an escape route. And it is a funeral celebrated in such distant anticipation. But we, by making the unforgivable mistake of dancing, believe we are securing ourselves without wanting to give space to apocalyptic and gloomy lyrics, where disillusionment becomes the absolute ruler. 

We will pay the price on the day when, instead, our eyes will bend over these words as heavy as slabs of marble.

Oh well: may time be granted the power to punish us.

 If we want to be a bit attentive then we have at least to give space to the observation, in the economy of the instruments, of how the bass is decisive, with its propensity to make Postpunk its master, point of reference and sublime actor in the recitation of its entire collection of samples. 

And the guitar? It appears much less, but it knows how to do it as if to grant the future a minimal but extraordinary memory.

I have already mentioned synth and it is good not to forget  arrangements, like hasty comets waiting for the crash into the void.

This record manages to arouse enthusiasm within a toxic cloud and it is time to describe it, song by song.

Song by Song 

1 Vortex

And it is initial thunder, tremor and prophecy sniffing each other, a hypothetical place being shown amid chilled fumes and a woman's intense voice blowing, leaping in persuasive tones within this slow, syncopated rhythm.

2 Rainy

A wild display of lucid but somber sounds, the watery dance comes down from the sky to alarm our eyes, with a peripheral guitar surrounding the breath. And it is Darkwave and Postpunk in perfect conjunction, to cloud the senses within the dilated dust of a music that resists the onslaught of time.

3 Blue Eyes

Bass and guitar in enthusiastic parade open the dance of blue eyes only in appearance: melancholy wins the duel and sits, victorious, on the face, while a heartbreaking synth kisses notes like windshield wipers activated because tears must be wiped away.

4 Vase

A voice with a malevolent reverberation comes, in the march that advances hypnotic, slowly. Vocals seize the forces and place a successful attack. And we have an earthquake in slow motion, glacial.

5 Feel

The male voice arrives after a few seconds and it is astonishment. A rhythmic liturgy makes us dance like extravagant, inebriated puppets, everything becomes dark and dramatic, vocals are able to oppress, breaking down resistance to leave room for the erotic play of guitar and synth in a state of grace.

6 Banish Sorrows

New ballistic gem: the duo creates another edifice of perfect and  balanced sounds to come into contact with a splendid crescendo, a loop that only keyboards can generate. And it is a chase in the hallways of fears.

7 Angeldust

The 80s, cleaned up, sanitized, updated and corrected, find peace in this track, absolute dominator, able to make us shorten our breath. Like an apocalyptic rumble, the voice caresses atoms of seconds with its high register and it is pure sensory madness.

8 Your Skin Turns Blue

The deception of the first few seconds would seem to take us towards the dramatic atmospheres of Joy Division. Then, however, it goes elsewhere, with an agony similar to that of the Mancunian band as its gift. Chaos and rapture kiss each other.

9 Hinter Schweren Gedanken.

Echoes of Pankow's early ebm flashes seem willing to reiterate the awe, the love of the present record. Then one runs with combat boots into the cold water of this music that becomes emblematically even colder.

10 Phantom

The breath sinks under the dome of Phantom, the crucifix slowly falling inside our feeling that there is no more time to dream. The end of this strategic and stratospheric album comes with a decadent singing, like the cry of a wounded siren. And the musical notes are the place of all dissolution, the total collapse, the perfect farewell.

Alex Dematteis 

Musicshockworld 

Salford

21st December 2022

https://detritirecords.bandcamp.com/album/left-for-pleasure-human-contract

https://open.spotify.com/album/1KYEQvojuIn6ufSjNpDuv0?si=otbNk95CR9SUL1mud-yGFg

My Review: Roller Derby * Starry- Eyed

Roller Derby * Starry-Eyed

Hamburg is a sanguine bubble: spilling liquid with the support of silent winds, looking to make a comeback in perfectionist and serious Germany.

If we think of its past, it would be enough to mention Xmal-Deutschland to smile and give thanks for that unique moment when beauty and quality lived in the same breath.

If we stay up-to-date, if we remain curious, then here come three guys with dreams yet to be opened up to a world busy filling every possible space.

They will, however, enter our heart because they have the grace of uniqueness that organ needs.

In their gravitating between carefree harmonies and an aptitude for making grey an interesting colour, here comes their seventh single, a Indie Pop flame with an Dreampop skin, which will make its way into your afternoons in pursuit of stars with the desire to embrace you.

It's songs like these that size up boundaries, styles, putting the need for a constant play in the centrifuge.

It will be Philine Meyer's voice, which seems to come from a comet in search of beats capable of giving it space, or the guitars with their concentric, rapacious yet sinuous riffs with a celestial propensity, and much more, that will arouse this beauty in your listening.

A composition absolutely capable of putting you in touch with the desire for a dessert, a coffee, and a dance amongst walls full of dreams to be lit...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

19th October 2022

My Review: SixTurnsNine - Borders

 SixTurnsNine - Borders

We take a plane and fly to Düsseldorf, West Germany, to breathe in all the artistic perfume that city has always emanated.

Very active, capable, important, it also has in its arms a marked propensity to continually come up with bands that are able to fascinate, attract, giving its harbor a chance to put on the market really interesting music.

The scribe's ear listens to the debut album of the German combo that he feels is the most structured in generating hype, intensity, richness because of its willingness not to remain tied only to the history of its place of belonging, but rather to have in its possession the capacity for an international scope that plays totally in its favor.

After five years spent getting to know each other, experimenting and creating their own songs, the three knights of pure fascination decided to take the plunge by releasing Borders, which, without wasting any time, is a jewel that sticks to the tissues of the mind, reaches the pericardium and invades the veins, all of them, to cuddle them through melodies and solutions with a skillful use of electronic music.

The whole thing could be trivialized by "It's Trip hop": nothing could be more incomplete, partial and far from the truth.

The attitude and the dress are undeniable, but immersing oneself in a careful listening one catches not only nuances, but also constructions not necessarily related to that genre.

Instead, we manage to notice glimpses of Post-Punk flames, within streams of debris from Industrial music held expertly as a contour, to give space to clouds of Proto-Goth, creating an evocative and original whole.

Lutz Bauer is the genius, the driver of sounds, the man who sculpts the compositions providing spectacular, fresh, modern suggestions, without forgetting decades that seem distant.

The bassist is called Philip Akoto, the poet of richness, with an overpowering talent and the ability to wrap Lutz's architectures perfectly.

Then she, Anja Valpiani, the extraordinary voice with velvety, romantic, sensual vocals, a dew with crystals in her uvula. She has the merit of not seeing her native language as a hindrance: she sings perfectly in English and her technique is not at all penalized, as are the lyrics that seem to be written by a native speaker.

Lights, dimness and darkness are emotional territories that are vivisected and brought inside a contemplation that leaves nothing to chance. 

Music as words that enchant, words as music that nourish our listening and throw it toward lightness, despite the dark light of night, for the three bring us rays of sunshine anyway.

One needs method in listening, to be able to identify the myriad elements (not just influences) that make this debut compact and intense, one needs to search, only in this way we can be gently swept away by a sensory cascade that will create limitless benefit. Listening then becomes a funnel that will lead us into the intuitive, programmed channel developed by the three German trees, yes, that's right, because they are individually capable of giving strength and a beautiful vision. But their union makes their personal qualities skyrocket: Borders is a palette of smells which have been given a physical form, a miracle capable of producing spurts of intimacy made to reach ecstasy and catharsis.

There is a blues tension that permeates the entire work, especially because of some vocal passages by Anja, who manages to vary her incredible interpretations by following the flow of the music, as if hypnotized and seduced by incentives coming from the set of notes, in order to fly freely with her inner tension. 

It is articulated fluorescence that arrives inadvertently, as further confirmation of a power that from all sides flows into the centre of our perceptive senses.

One is surrounded by the gentleness, the sensitivity, the lightness that descends from the clouds into our central nervous system, which is eager for a delicate upheaval.

It is also necessary to give credit to lyrics that range widely, from love that is felt, that seeks protection, that wants sharing, to a romantic and positive attitude even in writing about the pain, the toil of existence, all with strokes of imagination perfectly stitched to reality.

With attached description of wills that put perfectly branched hemispheres in our listening and subsequent interpretations.

The impact of the connections between the outside and the inside are specified through powerful and compelling lyrics.

It is comforting and caressing to see how the atmospheres and modes chosen to express magnetic streams of intense magic also have in its DNA a way of doing that consumes the Trip hop experience to extract the juice from a fruit that seemed to have been squeezed entirely. Instead, these peerless Germans re-present it, but with a willingness to show its value with the purity of mixtures that enhance its prestige.

Moments, Fatigue, Ginger: songs in which we all experience an elegant electric shock inside dark but grace-filled atmospheres.

Flames is the perfect blend of a feeling that The Cure could move towards this musical planet and Trip hop.

Love Map offers vocals that roll up inside the beats, and it's steam that melts into crooning and brushstrokes of enchantment.

But all the compositions have an immensity to be touched with the magic of tricks that will leave you speechless....

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

26th September 2022

Date release: 30th September 2022

My review: Xmal Deutschland - Fetish

 

XMAL DEUTSCHLAND- FETISCH

1983

LP-Fetisch (CAD302):

Qual, Geheimnis, Young Man, In Der Nacht, Orient, Hand InHand, Kaempfen,

Danthem, Boomerang, Stummes Kind

Genuflection 

Silence

A silent prayer on our knees ...

It is 1980s West Germany that speaks to us, we need to be careful, over there nothing is taken lightly, everything is serious ...

I address my review to young people: you have tons of things to learn from our Mom Anja and her Hamburg family ...

Xmal arrives and it is a detonation, fragments that spread in the dark sky that from Hamburg reaches the rest of the world ...

To call this an album is an understatement, by the way: FETISCH is a book and the pages do not turn yellow because talent does not know the influence of time ... FETISCH is the Bible for people like me who was lucky enough to listen to it six months after its release. From that point on it was always and only devotion towards those sounds, those references that turned their gaze to the Land of Albion, but then, as true Germans, they assembled everything with the perfection which is typical over there, where perfection is the starting point. ..

And it is a saber, a Wave metal that enters the skin, we find here songs that are the Olympus of beauty, a collection of that side of  New Wave which was able to combine rhythm, power, style, subtlety and more or less perceptible references to become a dance of the black heart in the nights of a city called Hamburg with its eyes open...

This album is the father of a generation that has copied it without restraint, because not having the same talent it could only do that ...

FETISCH arrived at the moment when the soul claimed beauty, a timeless album that still amazes and surprises ...

To the young people that I mentioned earlier I say that it is necessary to show gratitude for these songs that are the lung of the 80's, dark, extreme exaggerated but valid as never before ...

An album that comes to surprise the inept and the foolish: here the sound is the Sovereign and the songs their subject ...

There is sadness, there is movement of the soul that seduces without escape, the first album that, immature, shakes and leads us to maximum satisfaction.

Subtle arrangements, including bass, drums and guitars that are the altar on which Anja stands in all her immensity ...  it is devotion, it is a sparkle, it is a multiple orgasm to be the listeners of her unique voice, the cry of my heart explodes in its intense and seductive ability to make us become stupid, stoned by such a great skill ...

Xmal Deutschland was the band that changed the rules, the game destroyed because distracted by the artistic lesson of an album that is an absolute masterpiece, recognized by fools only a few years later ...

But the New Wave people of the time, attentive and faithful, immediately understood that they have before themselves an album that shook, killed ancient convictions, it was no longer just music ...

A debut preceded by some songs that like a stain from the silent Hamburg expanded in the industrious and capable Germany to get to take root especially in England, in France and at  the Nordic countries ...

Soon some lovers of that extraordinary album would become musicians, sacking the Fetisch Treasure because nothing else could be done ...

If there is an album from which we can learn the ABC of beauty is just that, there is no escape, it is impossible to run away from it.

QUAL

The post punk finally takes leave, he greets everyone with QUAL, a song in which the last gleams show themselves, but then it is pure Wave, inlays of German electronics take over, nervous guitars supported by an equally nervous drumming, an imposing bass, a timid keyboard which make everything sturdy and then HER, Our Priestess ANJA, who with her voice bewitches us, imprisoning us in the black and dark cave ...

GEHEIMNIS

Here it is the Batcave mixed with the German impulses which becomes a compact, aggressive, suggestive, cathartic, obsessive combo ... it is the dance of the senses that beats its head in front of this mixture of sounds that, ridden by the voice of the Priestess, merge in us, we are drunk with perfection, a lesson in style ...

YOUNG MAN

The sound darkens, the guitars scratch the skin, a keyboard that suspends, a bass that is a flight that flies low in our belly, while the Priestess spreads the dust with her voice drenched in blood and clouds ...

IN DER NACHT

Hold on, hold on I said!

Here everything entangles, we are open mouths in which seduction, rapture and ecstasy enters to change us forever, this is the celebration of the talent of inventiveness, sighs and screams arrive with a keyboard that is sacred, we are at Mass, the Holy Mass of Devotion, our listening is a prayer ... A song with a strong sensorial impact, an emotional bath that hurls us to the ground, pushing our faces down and our hearts upwards ...

ORIENT

Stunned, engulfed by compulsive tribalism, an introduction that buries us, we are at the center of the earth, we are worms ... Xmal with this song hits us, launches the attack, a song that develops its macabre dance until we cry, losing control, and here the Priestess does not forgive, her singing becomes Ancient, the persuasiveness that becomes art, we are in her jugular ... meanwhile the band insists on shaking us, oriental carpets in the keyboard, Anglo-Saxon matrix guitar, a bass that it is mantra, drums that are a chisel.

HAND IN HAND

And here we sink, the breath is a memory, Hand in Hand is the coma, the injection that anaesthetises us, it's a rarefied, biblical song, lit candles, the Priestess reveals her talent, we see the light, we go crazy, we are not more able to resist.

KAEMPFEN

Drums like rocks that disintegrate, guitars which crowd the gloomy place, the Priestess sits on her throne with a simple but powerful keyboard, her singing opens and what are we? We are nerves exploding by their glow ... and we dance like zombies in the cave ...

DANTHEM

It arrives slowly ... and we are faced with a new exercise of infinite beauty, only fools will continue to compare the XMAL to the Banshees and the Priestess to Siouxsie ...: they are different, open your ears and your hearts, come on, you can do it ... DANTHEM is the XMAL sound refuge, unreachable, violent and full of decadence ...

BOOMERANG

Acid in our veins here, we are bodies in a liquefaction condition, this song is the key to reading a debut album that is about to end and it does it with a song that is the synthesis of their sound DNA, simplicity and research come together, while the voice of the Priestess presents itself with low tones, a rope around our throats, a boomerang that hits us on the forehead ...

STUMMES KIND

The Mass is ended, but what peace, are you crazy?

XMAL and the Priestess take leave to kill us all with vocal and sound groans, screams that break us up, please remember, we must genuflect in adoration. An album that ends without missing the last pearl, here the New Wave shows the Passport for the future, we are warned, XMAL does not grant a  chance ... we are at the apotheosis, we are drops of blood that tremble in front of STUMMES KIND, the mother of the sound of the times ahead!

Alex Dematteis 

Musicshockworld 

Salford