Grey Gallows - Strangers
There is always something that does not belong to us, that seems alien to us: places, people, time. A sensation that often generates malaise and is made clear by two Greek creatures directly linked to truth, concreteness, and the ability to give us awareness. Now at their fourth album, Konstantin and Dionisis push on the accelerator and immerse us in a liquid that envelops thoughts, lubricates them and makes them stagnant so that we can better understand this feeling of being out of place, in the field of dispersion. They compose a dense record, where the boundaries of their qualities emerge and establish a contact, a bond and a pact that is configured in a trust that is able to give strength. The same that is shown to be absolutely generous in these eleven compositions that define their maturity: a work truly capable of scarifying every doubt and making visible the shadow of the malaise that has crept onto the soil of our existences. Two knights who agitate thoughts but never advice: it may be because of their land, always capable of avoiding being superfluous. Or perhaps it will be because of the talent to detect, to be a base of consciousness that wants to stimulate new propensities. The sound has become rougher, the electronics establish the desire for a modernity that is not an end in itself, but rather the need for an information tool that can be understood by many more people. Hovering in the verses are motions of fatigue, of aggression against stupidity, the desire to make their art a springboard towards the mental palace in which they do not feel foreign at all. Lies, passive obscurities, oiled mental and physical chains are targeted, the desire for an eternal life that takes into account limits is proposed, the cage that lubricates the inevitable surrender is confronted and a deaf land is discovered, incapable of listening and connecting to the true needs of amalgamation. An extreme journey, which highlights how the musical genres (as always close to the tortured smile of those generous eighties) have this time felt the desire to take a leap forward: recovering the glorious Greek melodic history to position it in current sounds, to make possible a balancing act and a future propensity, where everything becomes unknown and dark. The two do not joke: the synths and guitars are judgments that plug mouths, sentences that shake, making your senses vibrate towards that pain you always think you can avoid. Konstantin's singing is the bite of a shark within frequencies that leave electric shocks, in the baritone zone that makes the abdomen a box that does not transmit, but receives its priestly evocative expressions. Dionisis is an illustrator of mental scribbles capable of making everything matter, touchable, to connect with his musical partner in the game, gloomy, of being able to create a visual field that simultaneously dismays and consoles.
They decided to be joined by two amazing voices, two performers who put silk on every outpost of pain.
Kriistal Ann is a tenebrous goddess, a member of Paradox Obscur, who knows how to convert human approximation with her voice into an immense celebration of quality.
Ειρήνη Τηνιακού (better known as Irini Tiniakou), the voice and hand on enchanting synths of the band Incirrina, lends her lunar-beam-filled vocal horns to make the wave full of leaden magnets even heavier, for a result that makes listening an unavoidable gasp.
Grey Gallows' choice to bring them on board proves to be a winning one, exciting for the continuity of the complex path that Strangers offers: closed the circle, it is only a matter of finding the breaths to stay alive… The intensity, the voracity, the precision of every single episode of this amphitheatre that can accommodate our desire to be spectators of a millenary dance in free fall: their stage becomes our heartbreak, beautiful and dutiful. They have written their most complete work, deserving of the deepest and most convinced adoration, because when Darkwave, Coldwave, Post-Punk, and Electronics find themselves to be protagonists, wanted and wisely enabled to express themselves, then the artistic circuit of the two Greeks goes beyond the aforementioned list to become a glass butterfly with black wings: all we have to do is follow in the wake of their eleven flights…
Song by Song
1 - Strangers
A keyboard full of balm for thoughts spreads its arms: it is the beginning of the album, after fifty-nine seconds the rhythm of the drum machine brings us a gift of what had preceded it, and this certainty, combined with the mode of the singing, which is a list of oscillations, makes us immediately aware of conspicuous improvements. A grenade, a shot, a splinter coming out of a Post-Punk bass and an electronic universe condensed from the gills of a Coldwave, ravenous to exercise the role of foreigner in the world of emotional absence, immediately launches the old scribe into the knowledge that the two Greek artists have lowered the sky…
2 - The Cage
This leaden sonic arrow is a stage where their new inclinations are displayed, the fruit of commendable work in search of a mode that expresses all the density of feeling art as an absolute quest, where what is learned is not kept hidden. Generous and credible, the band explores a plethora of musical genres, not by extrapolating what could be useful, but rather by bringing it all towards a stratospheric manipulation, improving, producing in the listening the sensation of a house walking in the fog, through hungry synths, capable of caging freedom and making us discover the privilege of a truly useful and necessary sensorial and motor imprisonment. One dances worriedly, attentively, developing circuits of attention that decree the success of this song: let the record show that this duo is incapable of writing nonsense and vulgarity, while, on the contrary, making us grow with awareness…
3 - Spirits (feat. Kriistal Ann)
A partial slowdown of rhythm, the glacial synth opening the door to an echo, and then it is an opaque incandescence that, through Kriistal's voice, is filled with evocations traversed by limpid restlessness, ranging musically from the ability to connect Coldwave to the saddest Synth Pop. The result is that, when the rhythm changes, the doubled vocals and abundant doses of electronics push us towards the sky, in a race to meet the soul...
4 - Dying Light
Dying Light is the identity card of fears, loyally displayed, within questions and steps that cross ego and strength, with death showing its scent, approaching.
But the two from Patras, western Greece, make use of magnificent substances in the infinite well of Darkwave to tilt the whole thing into the blood-bed of a hieratic, imposing Coldwave, definitively determined to give them a throne of icy flames.
They break through the wall that hides the truth by revealing their talent, giving us a dance that is free of conditionings, a wad of dark propensities in an intimate search for mysteries and steep treks to the bottom.
One cries with balance, one lowers one's head and lets one's body go towards contact with the purest beauty: that of dependence on a song that gives the transparency of our innermost secret…
5 - Lies
If there is any contact with the Greek band's past, perhaps it could be found in this track, but then you realise how the sound is more structured thanks to the excellent production work that enhances the musical texture and vocals, with the synth counterpoints in the refrain that are dry, brief but majestic. A gothic fluorescence that grants space to the pop that here becomes dark, for a final victory of a resounding synthesis of quality. Rather than inside lies, we find ourselves in the truth of their class, in the psychedelic glow of a Darkwave married for a moment to Coldwave...
6 - Deafland
A song like a present within which we witness the surprise of an initial "light" approach but immediately blocked by a landslide of trees with a face burdened with pain, to determine the value of a dance in the sign of Darkwave glints that come from immersion in the eighties, especially given by the mode of Synths that take us back to the times when the Legendary Pink Dots and the first Clan of Xymox travelled freely in our listening. Then it is all the density of the Patras combo that emerges, managing to make this track the manifesto of their maturation and mutation: it will know how to be necessary poison for all kinds of deafness
7 - Bare Inside (feat. Irini Tiniakou)
A progression becomes apparent: it may be Irini's partial spoken word, or some mystery that wants to keep it that way, the fact is that the synths and guitars here are turbulent, nervous gods, capable of creating friction in thoughts. The song shows how the musical avenue continues to swell its boundaries: dilations, styles that embrace, no friction, for a black river that shows the bare vault of a truly intense creation. When joy has amphibians and a sky full of black clouds...
8 - The Night in Me
The opening part reminds us of the short-lived epic of Valerie Dore, a very capable but too soon forgotten artist. When Konstantinos' singing arrives everything goes dark, the hands of visions enter his voice that produces a duodenal riot: all the sadness lives in his tone, while the drumming invents small diversifications that fascinate and a vocal brings us back to Gregorian chants. While the guitar dwells in the greyness that makes this track absolutely perfect…
9 - Chains
'Going to the Fathers': from the meaning, Latin, of the city of the two Greek artists, we can understand much about this piece, as it exudes ancient scents of belonging to the history of their places. It lives a spirit that seems to die hard, with notes delivered to synths and guitar to testify to a link, a chain (precisely) with what inevitably belongs to the past. Because music is a bridge, without connecting anyone but the beauty of the truth, bitter, that Konstantinos and Dionisis know how to, skilfully, make physical. Echoes of Ultravox and Klinik seem to suggest that the Grey Gallows are indispensable in conceiving clarity towards them. Like a broom full of dust, with small Ebm traces and electrodes from Kraftwerk, this melancholic earthquake will sweep away fake happiness, showing us the solidity of the chains...
10 - In Eternity
There was a song missing that was accessible to some restless presences, for those souls who dance around searching for thoughts like hooks in the night: in this case they do so by offering us eternity. If you took certain moments of Camouflage, Wire and NamNamBulu, in an absurd musical salad, the result would be this song, which is the historical moment of the seventies leaving their mark and taking leave to embrace the coming decade, all the way to the two thousand. In a guise that includes a distorted but necessary romanticism, the poetry rises in the poignant guitar that makes even the most steadfast heart weep...
11 - Silentium
Every ending is connected to silence and the title chosen by the band is the perfect closing: a summary of what has happened with the gloomy flavour of a sacredness expressed from the opening bells, then from the synth that opens up the precipice, the need for peace that passes through death. As if the Fields of The Nephilim had met Cthulhu on the shores of the Ionian Sea, with the Grey Gallows ceremonising a religious function devoted to the consecration of the passing. Slow and evocative, this hypnotic lava is the definitive confirmation of a talent that had never reached these depths. Gone is the dancing movement, the flowing, rhythmic propensity to make their creations also a compromise with catchiness, this last track is an extraordinary performance: the souls that feel estranged from the decadence of this world are killed in order to confer directly on the infinite. The strategic choice of positioning it as the last also gives the conviction that the duo's journey through immensity will have a glorious continuation...
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Supino
4th May 2023
https://greygallowsgr.bandcamp.com/album/strangers
