My Review: Sinéad O’Connor - Troy

Sinéad O’Connor - Troy

Stories that enter life, often unverified, take a leap towards the human will to believe them, without wavering. Mythology helps, amplifies, generates a field in which everything rolls. We must go inside the greatest deception of earthly existences, enter the first real Matryoshka, a horse inside which strategy had its nest, to win a war, puzzling that it should be called a war of love. But a woman was kidnapped, torn from her reality and taken away.

In Sinèad O'Connor's debut album, we have the practicality of art that connects the threads, disintegrates them, disguises them, to throw them into the sacred temple of pain, of the greatest affront one can suffer: the lie.

An emotional implantation that runs back in time, probably also drawing on the pain of the Irish author herself, who in this composition frees the horses of her nature, wild as they are, to aim her uvula at hearts like a dutiful scratch, using an affair as a passport that binds the identity of truth to a badly tanned destiny. Love is shown, confronted, challenged, lost, leaving no opportunity to take refuge in a dream with a different destiny. What emerges is the most disconcerting, touching dowry, with a volume equal to the breadth of the universe: the ability to interpret words as if they were born in that instant and thrown into history, to touch the breath of the city of Troy, pretext and metaphor of the damnation that still pulsates in us, its legitimate heirs. A cut, a cry, screams like ivy inflamed by the dying blackness that mocks human events. She turns the lights on her resolute talent, permeated with a slime that sticks shame and welds it into the pulse of often seemingly harmless methods. A journalist of misery and cowardice, Sinéad begins the piece by musically evoking the Iliad and the Odyssey, taking us into the chronological hemisphere with which we are unfamiliar. The orchestration is a tomb that opens, waiting for its song, which is not only powerful but, more than anything else, a conscious cry that penetrates and builds the wooden horse full of secrets ready to kill the apathy of those who live poorly the absolute capacity of music to be a bridge, a highway and a wiper to move debris. It whispers, it accelerates, it screams, it groans, it plants oxygen like crabgrass as its eyes visit for us every sin to be atoned for. An orchestral tumult like thunder that seeks a momentary education to find a peace that instead, as the minutes pass, precipitates, seeking tentacles in the empty space of time and sky. Ancient feuds wash over, everything is accomplished with a score that becomes electric, with the melody sequestered by strings and then by a dry, metallic drumming that seems to punish even more, handing over to the change of rhythm one of the seven sceptres the song seems to need to maintain a balance.

Throughout the history of music, female singers have always pressed the button towards ostracism between the true and the false, creating mutes resistant to defamation and lies. The shiny-headed singer slips inside (in an intimate coat that she will never quite manage to conceal) a long series of reflections in order to tie up the past (the Trojan affair) and make it fit, without kissing it, with the awkward and problematic situation of the world in that late eighties that made approximation the outpost of what is happening now. The song allows the Irish singer to stitch together her visionary progressive attitude (it is no coincidence that the melodic texture of the song reminds us of Peter Gabriel, with whom she will later tour), both in the lyrics and in the musical carpet, a true temporary catapult, launching projectiles, wounding, without any anaesthesia. Everything knows sacredness and embarrassment: in its sighs, in the breath that falls heavy in the words, we cannot but wither. This can only happen if we are endowed with sensitivity and if we really know the story being told. Wisteria the sighs, ivy the high notes, for a portal of upheavals that not only throw us off balance. When her voice sinks into the low register, death seems to be beneath our feet and our ears tremble, like an inevitable earthquake. It is the strings that bring us back to the sky and make us feel less afraid.

"You should've left the light one": an invocation that splits the sky and like a rudderless wind takes away our joy and throws us into the storm of an orchestra excellently conducted by Gavyn Wright. A due, necessary race towards the appointment of lies makes forgiveness improbable: Sinéad is clear-headed and, like a torch, she lights the truth and nails it, forever, with this song, which deploys the sinful, Catholic-derived doings to give guilt improbable excuses. If one reflects on the systematic circular reproduction of the musical parts, one understands how the singing is a rake, a halberd for scratching and wounding the naivety of those who always find a way to pretend nothing is going on: long, by the pop standards of the time, the song is a theatrical act that needs a single light and many windows to expand the tale and stick it to the inevitable tremor on which the last words feed. 

"But you're still spitting fire": this is the stance that makes the characters, the roles, the misdeeds visible. Beware: in the story we only have one point of view, the other person has no voice, no reply. While we wonder why, here is Sinéad giving us an absolute truth, a ball of incontrovertible wisdom: even if she had told us a lot of lies, she would have our empathy, as surely pain does not need to expand to legitimise itself... Strikingly, the storm over the Dublin sky (at the beginning of the song) is an exhilarating exercise in taking us well away from the epicentre of facts and intentions right from the start. Ancient architecture, no longer known in this day and age, allows the text to do a bit like the kangaroo, a bit like the shrimp, managing to exert pressure in the ability to identify where the connection is. The voice, a warlike impasto of absolute poetry, takes care of it, spouting verses and throwing stones, defeating Troy, love, managing to disguise the whole...

The microtonal oscillations are paths of wild roses to the point of excess: nothing has perimeter, either in the text or in the music, to achieve the effect of a ride, sick and losing.

What more can be added but that the polyphonic sense, the symphonic beam, the bar of classical music are but umpteen miracles within this chick that today kisses Troy with the same heavy tears...

Nothing remains but love to keep you alive, Sinéad...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

1st August 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c4v7fp5GC8&t=90s

My Review: Gilla Band - Sports Day

Gilla Band - Sports Day

There is an Ireland extraordinarily gifted in knowing how to make the listener wait, only to pierce them with a song that is nothing more than a cave of metal falling on us. 

Hallucinated, hermetic, generously even swaggering and built on a loop that reeks of electronics ruined by uncontainable madness, the track in question is a slow wall of noise on an industrial inspiration, which gets drunk and exhausts, giving the sensation of a cluster of bees in the brain. The base, the intuition, is a Post-Punk amphitheatre emptied of mannerism, which concedes the scene to slow, acid noise, resulting in a wonderful disturbance to the eardrums!

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Supino

30th April 2023

https://gillaband.bandcamp.com/track/sports-day?from=search&search_item_id=1641004812&search_item_type=t&search_match_part=%3F&search_page_id=2573151978&search_page_no=0&search_rank=1&logged_in_menubar=true

My Review: Submotile - One Final Summit Before The Fall

 Submotile - One Final Summit Before The Fall

"Tension is who you think you should be. Peace is who you are."

Chinese proverb

The beauty of being able to arrive at inner peace through listening to music is something rare, a privileged propensity, an event that smooths the accumulations of toxins that every experience of this life normally offers.

In the world of continuous and exaggerated music production, the reality that emerges, in all its seriousness, is that of the unwillingness to take the time to study, to recognize, to evaluate and weigh what we listened to.

But in doing so we should always keep in mind that this is a type of knowledge that needs method and respect.

The risk is to accumulate songs and albums in the place where awareness gets stuck and does not allow the fluidity of received impulses in order to historicize them for their real value.

In this October of the year 2022 comes a rose garden that glows with freshness and where the colours of emotion and curiosity are intact and capable of swelling our eyes in a joy that amazes and knows no addiction.

The authors of this secular miracle are Submotile, a combo of two souls devoted to rhythmic poetry, angels who develop melodies that enter our veins releasing the oxygen which fortifies the breath of enchantment.

The third album is a soft pyramid that unsettles the heart by enveloping it in rhythmic arms, devoted to melodic impact that defeats all reaction: a work that smells of untouchability, making us beings kneeling in adoration.

Listening to these new songs is a journey into astonishment that materializes in the place of unwavering embrace, in the midst of polite broadsides and brushstrokes of sonic craters that unveil the light of our beats inclined to dream. A nine-chapter story that is neither fable nor novel, but a continuous breath of episodes like sheets of paper that absorb their natural gifts of being spellbinders and soft rulers of the realm of a modern Atlantis, where the impossible travels among the notes and not on the sea.

Like a modern Poseidon and Plato, they have the life-and-death power of their souls hiding their creature's latitude from us while showing the myth of the depth.

A remarkable step forward from the previous two works: a sense of compactness and research to develop structures that are not tied to a specific genre. To be able to communicate new languages that give the two  of them a way to have more arrows in their bow, taut and capable of making music cover long and precise distances.

What reigns is the certainty that the two artists have found a balance, the maturity necessary to defeat the feeling that it is only a state of grace that rewards our lucky listening: repeating them confirms this reasoning, revealing how much of the future is already evident in this album which is the first breath of their new vitality, giving Daniela Angione and Michael Farren the outfit that will protect them later on. This album shows their artistic condition in perfect health, confirming their propensity to truly experience music as a project of growth. Here the songs are bricks, concrete and all that is needed to make their house solid.

It seems more than three years have passed since their brilliant debut with Ghosts Fade On Skylines, which had connected the scribe to the Italian/Irish duo. A work in which a feathery impetuosity won, while in the second Sonic Day Codas the melody of vocals and a more dreamy inclination made us be listeners benefited by songs that also reiterated how shoegaze was changing skin. In this third album everything is confirmed, but adding more freedom to the creation. Through it all, the second consecutive production by Simon Scott, the Cambridge drummer of Slowdive, reveals that their union is capable of raising the bar of their wills, of making their compositions a confidence-filled gaze toward an increasingly astonished and amazed sky.

The watts at their disposal are many, embedded in Daniela's tiara and Michael's diadem: these symbols of power are rightly above the heads of the artistic couple, which brings forth in us humble listeners the joy of knowing that we are ruled by songs that turn us into sovereigns of pleasure and unfettered fortune. Music and words, the beautiful cover that makes us fly over the peaks of the world: everything, in this third step of their splendid career, finds a way to be beauty without an expiration date.

Daniela's lyrics have taken care to possess the ability to transcend the belief that love, loneliness, memory, trust, redemption, awareness of the power of the mind and the experience of life are not important in these genres of music: all these topics are visited by the gentle soul of this Italian who combines her descriptive maturity with the beauty of her singing, always convincing, free of hesitation.

For his part, Michael leaves nothing to chance: his fingertips, his pedals are a pact for eternity where everything exists powerfully, the sense of rhythm resting on notes nailed by their own beauty to live and die with our listening. The sound is sullen, resolute, dynamic, steeped in moments where everything reaches the heights represented by the cover of this record. And the stratospheric Blood Loss confirms his ability not to be oblivious to semi-acoustic flavored windings before diving, lightly, into a slightly more powerful sound, but we will see all this better in the Song by Song analysis.

It overwhelms the sense of absolute ability to take their musical journey to the inner mountain of their sensibility, conspicuous and infectious, to make us wandering particles, as an obligatory stop toward a friendly destiny: music can rarely do this, it is necessary to give them credit. The style, the sense of belonging towards their roots avoid comparisons, there is no need to give them a positive evaluation because there are references in which to feel comfortable: what suffocates any musical genre is precisely this condition and their talent lies also in this aspect, because they are able to travel inside Noise, Shoegaze, Dreampop and an often disguised Alternative, with great elegance, as well as with remarkable skills, to find their own uniqueness.

These are songs that give the certainty that loneliness and social sharing can coexist, without disorientation or impossibility: personal intimacy and the desire to dance with other people live together in a love story with skin that changes like these stars, smooth and soft but also rough, inside a ring where the tiara and diadem fit perfectly, giving us magic and daydreams.

One Final Summit Before The Fall is the transiting universe of two souls who, in perfect health and union of purpose, show their curiosity and ability to observe dynamics that can still be explored and analyzed, in a continuous beam of light that allows us to see their trajectories limpidly, even when their wall of sound would theoretically seem to obscure the clarity that is instead inherent in their compositions: just listen to everything with depth and all is revealed in a golden scroll full of value…

Song by Song

From First Light Until Our Final Sleep

With the first seconds, characterized by guitars in the orbit of The Cure, the impression that the band's sound and attitude has changed is confirmed when continuing the song it takes us to the clear evolution of the rhythmic aspect, with 90's drumming, joyful but wrinkle-filled guitars, until the stop-and-go at minute three and fifty-eight seconds: everything becomes magmatic rock for a shimmer of splinters revealing a majestic presence. Thunder and noise united in the poetry of a revitalized shoegaze.

Resonica

The rhythm rises, guitars grate dust, psychedelia swaggering in for a track that drags with its ability to immediately explode, only to allow Daniela's voice to caress our hearts. Guitars like windmills until the refrain where everything becomes definitive, impetuous and cathartic. Can rhythm be given to the ethereal feeling? Certainly: Resonica is a dream with the muscles of a thoroughbred horse.

Hit This Summer

Scents of late '80s Dreampop conquer the first few seconds and then everything continues in the gentle frenzy of pulsing guitars perfectly embraced by drumming that paints impeccable trajectories to drive our legs crazy. A long pleasant sonic contortion leads us to realize that it is not a journey what we are taking with this song and album, but living in our home where we already have everything, without having to pack our bags. Hit This Summer is the duo's breeze watering our absinthe-filled veins.

Foreshadowing

The first single from this album is a petal in flight over memories, with many reminders that are anesthetized by a perfect production, precise and careful and capable of enhancing the music/vocals pair, enabling the Italian-Irish duo to write a jewel that, with incendiary guitars, removes the blanket from dreams to return the beauty of living, extinguishing the shadows.

Blood Loss

If there is a primordial cell of this album, it is Blood Loss, the Divine, the one that indicates the continuation of the band's artistic journey: the past is held under arm, the present, established by changes of rhythm and guitars that know how to play in the alternation of their dress intertwined with melodies, is a reality that transforms the desire to diversify it into a resounding fact. It is syncopated poetry that meets relief, through the academic kiss of a miraculous performance.

Hope In Sound

A celestial arpeggio immediately delivers a complex structure in which the bass engages the drumming and pushes it to wrap around the guitar. For her part, Daniela sings sinuously and everything becomes a controlled frenzy in a chorus with a pop matrix, which conquers and stimulates us to notice how the band has the ability to reach into different expressive terrains. Even without distortion one is swept away and attracted by this little siren that waters our skin with hypnotic summertime ecstasy, where fragrances are completely released.

Drop To Eternity

The most surprising song comes with its very first seconds: as if we were entering the room of their intimacy, the band unleashes a lively, tender jewel devoted to eternity because with them beauty does not age. One can stay young without being Dorian Grey, and with this new gem the devil surrenders: what we see is a clean ocean free to advance in the heart. Everything is choral, compact, incisive, in a clear demonstration that with them we can also listen to an acoustic part that, if drawn by their fingers, can comfortably enter us.

Ataraxia

Lightning, thunder, a story that becomes a cascade with twists and turns, changes of rhythm, rich but disciplined guitars, vocals in the backline but evocative, capable of dumbfounding us for miles and miles of pure sonic joy. Though devoid of copious doses of feedback and distortion, the penultimate track turns out to be powerful and magnetic.

Farewell Aquarius (And We Thank You).

The longest song of their entire career is a melancholy-tinged novel, a dutiful sieve of existence in the proximity of an epilogue shrouded in mystery. A lonely cloud drifts through the fog giving us a chance to notice  a remarkable work of the bass, which rides harmoniously on the trails of nostalgic guitars, close to Catherine Wheel, while the sidereal atmospheres allow Daniela to make her vocal chords magical, like cotton candy, and to be surrounded, in the central part of the track, by avalanches of sounds drunk with light. Then it's a long leave that makes us astonished and true to their clearly shoegaze approach, with fine strands of noise creating a perfect conclusion to a work that, without a doubt, is the Shoegaze album of 2022 for the scribe.

It is we who thank the band for this visit inside their majestic beats...

Date Release

21st October 2022

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

14th October 2022

https://submotile.com/album/one-final-summit-before-the-fall