My Review: Healthy God - Poison, healing, poison poison

 Healthy God - Poison, healing, poison

What an absolute marvel it is to be surprised again, after a lifetime of listening to music, and to experience such precise, clear and fluorescent joy?

The whole thing is organised by a lonely soul, an Italian author, from Milan, who took a trip to London to return to Italy, to the warm and welcoming Sicily.

What we are about to experience is an experience that envelops the senses and scatters them in time (musical knowledge and memory are extremely important in this listening), in the places that have made music an unquestionable temple where quality, value, and the sense of operating with precision reign supreme, mapping skills that always come in handy.

Daniele chases the shimmering clothes of pleasure, patrols the movements of pain by placing a hand over them to protect it, throws himself into the lacerated corridors of regrets and remorse, establishes a sonic contact with the crystalline and seductive electronics of Suicide, grafts pills of post-punk without exaggeration, writes a treatise on mysterious psychedelia with wax masks, and certainly doesn't neglect to baste a touch of Alternative to give moments of lightness in which the obvious class raises a smile, while in the surroundings the scream of difficulty pushes to prevail. These seven compositions, however, demonstrate a strategic balance, to make his music a complete menu, digestible, with multiple flavours and with the final surprise of being able to smell an intense perfume from the notes resting on a stave that seems to have been written among abandoned houses, steelworks and psychotropic raids.

Everything seems to be an analysis that, starting from being exploratory, is able to suggest an opening in which the conscious and the unconscious discuss in order to determine a reality that, in addition to being clear and precise, is able to push attention towards a direct participation on the part of the listeners.

Songs like intermittent signals, multiple SOSs, harried runs, villages painted by a mind aware that the landscape, in order to be comprehensible, must be experienced. And here the artist jumps, with a parachute that certainly comes from the early seventies, into the articulated electronic structures, capable of channelling resounding beats, imaginative and powerful drumming, acid guitars that work to fray the nerves of English history, to establish the enclosure of his fervid and fertile mind. One has the feeling that there are twenty and not seven songs that we can listen to: a fact that already reveals the power of a record that is a tractor intent on ploughing the listeners into obedient grains of earth.

The voice, the singing, the lyrics: how long has it been since the Old Scribe heard a compact like this, with the ability to move, worry and make one question? It is striking how the drama is combined with a strange sweetness, a poison that seems to shift towards the liquid that can recall the fragrance of perfumes that can stun.

The register is often high, the method is that of short, dry, well-pronounced words in English, and the skilful and truly profound ability to become one with the music. There is a sacredness in this record, a truly effervescent use of structural changes that broaden the scope of possibilities: it is like embracing a rifle and finding bullets of different types in the barrel and, when your finger presses the trigger, the explosion is a black and white rainbow that challenges the coloured one.

Without hesitation, let's get close to these thunderous and well-combed compositions, in order to feed on a work that I hope will succeed in intriguing you and give matter to your impulses, with the intention of being at the end of listening more disciplined in welcoming such a powerful album...

Song by Song

1 - Eternal Internal Fight 

An opening synthpop in the odour of Human League immediately shakes the skin, which, as the seconds go by, finds itself in the throes of an electropop scouring. It is as if we are listening to the sacred silence of a procession of intentions outside an abandoned shed.

2 - Can't Go On Can't Let Go

The pursuit of the subtlest post-punk, its howl polluting the sun, presents us with a track in which the guitar displays the story of its development with great intensity, with a modulated, powerful and at times husky vocal that impresses. And that arpeggio that appears before the refrain smells of immensity, like drops that from the American history of Television come to the present day...

3 - White Walls

It starts in 1971, the year Suicide was born, and picks up acid guitars, a loop that oxidises and corrupts. Then the guitar widens the suffering and drops all the bricks of these white walls ready to be tinged with grey...

4 - The Dance

Back comes the New York duo (Suicide) just long enough to show the beginning of a howl that seems to have tentacles of compressed musical genres, intent on keeping the origin a secret, in a hustle and bustle that remains convincing for the entire one hundred and fifty-two seconds

5 - Catholic Guilt

Here is the most intense and seductive song, an extension of concentric elements that cleverly let out oxygen bubbles: everything is here waiting for scratches and sound investigations that dismantle many convictions. Ultravox appear, you can hear the work of Cabaret Voltaire in searching for a concept and defining it, then entering with the almost comatose singing into the poetry of the investigation. The rhythm is a rambling, between swings and dives into the void....

6 - This Is Not A Game

Drops of noise coming from the stuttering lips of the Liars are just the pretext for writing a dramatic, syncopated track with minimalist but quite effective beats, and then giving the guitars the chance to generate splendid stellar chaos

7 - All These Sufferings Must Lead Somewhere

Three hundred and one seconds of pure hypnosis, in a variety of modes, under the banner of a slow but cunningly prodigal rhythm in channelling attention towards an analytical game where only the voice seems to want to range between sweetness and melancholy. The guitar, straight out of The Cure's Seventeen Seconds, acts as the glue to this strategic scattering of seeds, in a vortex with an intense, overwhelming and mystical climax. We weep metal tears, experience the frustration of pains that crouch like hyenas waiting for our weakness to convince them to attack us...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

20 April 2024

https://open.spotify.com/album/3H2W22PIH9hkzHatz8UlDv?si=xdhMhu62TzSJ8AR-SzhsEg

My Review: Estetica Noir - Amor Fati

 Estetica Noir - Amor Fati

The joy and damnation of life is all in the fat and poisonous hands of time, the one who remains young, immortal and has the gift of giving birth to existences and leading them to death. 

On this self-centred and selfish being, malignant and generous, there has been a deep, specific study over the millennia that has failed to change things. It has not even learnt to accept it, all the hard work has slipped into despair, even resignation, and each of us oil the mechanisms of our dreams to find strength and consolation.

Which is what the Turin-based band Estetica Noir has done in its new work, which is nothing more than a concept album that addresses some of the aforementioned themes, to become, through these nine compositions, a point of reference, a starting point, a heavenly traffic light in order to set off again towards a consciousness that will light up the darkness and make them surrender a little.  Amor Fati reveals completely different attitudes than in the past, a constant pressure towards form and content with the ability to cross time even musically speaking, with noble footholds and references that know how to make the whole appear like a painting depicting the past already immersed in breaking through to the future. Less gloomy, less tied to gothic clichés, this disc observes, describes, amplifies the goal of feeling no shame in visiting different perspectives, ending up warming the muscles of the heart and opening the corridors of the mind.  The journey reveals maturity, ingenuity, sensory elasticity, forays into territories little practised by the group in the past, a sowing of new experiences that sweetens the artistic language and makes it strong, precise, dynamic and engaging. The musical genres of which this gem is composed are a climatic, moody embrace, with the ability to stitch together these remarkable fluids with excellent production at the hands of Riccardo Sabetti, a magician at the service of the beauty and value of the material written by these four sound psychologists.

One is moved by the electronics, the beats, the sidereal flows of a new liquid face of synthwave, here capable of revealing new dynamics. Time, we said. That's it: the sifting carried out also shows the ability to make music dreamy, physical, vehement, cryptic, animalistic with grace, in a fury that sounds like a dictionary of semiotics, a bloody embrace that spares no energy to make it all comprehensible.  Dowsing songs in search of light, of an enlightened dimension that structures everything towards dilation, with the skilful manoeuvre of making even the legs, in constant movement, capable of dancing to make the interlocking of demanding topics as happy as possible.

Notice how the guitars are travelling companions, accomplices of an ensemble that is structured to make the compositions win: even in this aspect the maturation is evident, it brings, besides a novelty, the precise will to take care of the topics with a division of tasks that does not yield to any blackmail. And the voice is a cherry blossom capable of interpreting very well the torrent of vital and profound words, interesting, well written and excellently expressed in a manner that shows a stratospheric density.  The enjoyment of listening passes through the variations, runs and walks in the multiple atmospheres, in a windy flow that brings on board temperatures and emotional oscillations open towards the engagement with structures that, even if they remind us of things we have already heard, the band knows how to express better, for a result that tilts satisfaction in emotion: there are recurring shivers and stuns that kiss amazement, with the certainty that all this is only the beginning of a new sky that they have been able to invent...

The Old Scribe is certain of the value of this album, much less so of the ability of the masses to give it the acclaim it deserves and the use it deserves, as, for real, these songs are academics, indispensable information for maturing a growth that directs existence in the association of reality and dream in a new Eden...

Song by Song

1 - Burnout

"Why did the screen become your god? Why do you show guns instead of love?"

And it's immediately stormy, ebm spectres and acid synthwave gathered in a choral solo of screams that wander through the night to bestow conscious fruit to be watered. Synth plays like thunderstorm rays and the voice, doubled, creeps into your head as you dance already upset... 

2 - Pain

"A lot of lies ruined my reputation. Art brightened my empty days.

I couldn't be all I wished. Fragile dreams."

Astonishment becomes awareness, hatred, life, loneliness, illusion, all are confiscated by this melodic ride that, between coldwave with evening trickery and an electric game that comes from the Germanic shores of the eighties, reveals a neurotic ecstasy that makes one exhausted but faced with relational truth.

3 - Summer Shine

"You were the danger I loved, the dreg, the alien god, 

you were the pleasure of someone who dares."

The song that most shows the impact with the Italo disco of the 1980s and then glides towards the boundaries that Depeche Mode were never able to perfect, it is a steam full of claws that has chosen to be slower than the two previous tracks, managing to sow tension and interest, also through a vocal that shows remarkable differences compared to Silvio Oreste's entire vocal career.

4 - Faded

"I'm afraid of dying when this time will end. I want to play again.

 Can you hear me? I'm fading away."

Here is the dialogue with God, a venomous face-to-face, where human will is clarified with its boldness, with provocation, with knowing complaints. It dances with a format that releases synth jewels and a yearning, melancholic bass, creating a cradle between the precipices of a marvellous lyric.

5 - The End of Moraliadays

"Whenever you'll cry and whenever you'll smile, you know that I will be proud of you."

A change of atmosphere, the courage of an openness to human understanding that softens and makes us tender puppies content and sure of love. A mantric blanket takes hold of our stomachs, sparks of synths from Orchestral Manoeuvres in The Dark mixed then with a subtle work of diminishing instruments and then resuming and leading us towards the end of the day make the song a magnetic gem.

6 - Iter Vitae

Marco Caliandro is the author of the only instrumental track, a crossroads of seduction that starts from the kiss of Kraftwerk to join with supple ebm explorations, to make love to dreams, in a design where the film of a silent film takes space within this surreal magic…

7 - Strange Hologram

"Once upon a time, when the sky was bright, people talked and smiled."

The Queen of the album, the Goddess of consciousness who distributes decisions and nocturnal imprints, brings herself into the day. And she does so with almost suspended electronic branches, while the words are storms without surrender...

8 - Stockholm's Azure

"Where do we go, now? Life is too short to give up, we must stand."

The permanence, the struggle, the sense of the whole find a way to suggest an orgiastic sonic trail, atavistic impulses patrol the steps of life through this delirium, an up and down that highlights macronutrient vocals and the relief of a stave that contains rich swathes of light and darkness at arm's length.

9 - The Cell

"Do you think to have a choice? Walls of lies surround you."

This pregnant temple of brilliance ends in a slow, wintry rain, towards evening, at a time when truth cannot be silenced. The band unleashes an excruciatingly brilliant, wet, slow-moving sonic beam, a comet star that swings like the electronic turn of the band Placebo did. And it's a harmonious embrace between tears and weed-filled poetry....

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

9th April 2024

https://esteticanoir.bandcamp.com/album/amor-fati

My Review: Sacred Legion - The Silent Lineage

Sacred Legion - The Silent Lineage

"I was a child, that is, one of those monsters that adults fabricate with their regrets"

Jean-Paul Sartre

A corsair race, the funny ways of a past that flirts with wounds catapults itself into the neurasthenic tangle of lipstick music, perfectly fixed to the mystery that accounts for itself, in the deafening impermeability that fractures expectations and pretensions.

From the province of Frosinone, three adult figures work at the lathe, encircling the flanks of the clichés that would always like to be certain that every definition cannot be incorrect. And so the poor fantasy in power speaks of 'Death-Rock, Dark-Wave, Post-Punk', as the impetus of a vulgar approach.   But the band from Ciociaria does not have in its repertoire the need to travel with an identity defined by others: the terrain of manoeuvre is absolutely marked by a freedom that is obligatorily limited because it is necessary to describe human drifts, where consolation and culture, of literary derivation, favour more precise boundaries. The sacred temporal space governs the liturgical spasms of compositions that make every vicious circle surrender. They are far removed from those reference groups with which Fabiano, Mirko and Tony's band are associated. The album is a hundred-metre runner's sprint (given the brevity of its twenty-four minutes), but it lives with the propensity of the marathon runner, since listening, the carefully repeated one, shows the crossing of history, with geography constructing physical features, to the point of giving faces a light that reveals complexity. All eight songs foreshadow a future to be marked in their intellectual paths.  The three aim their refined stylistic abundance to encircle reality, curbing the stylistic hangover of different musical genres. It is orgasmic anticipation, it is the precipice of a refined abrasive combo, with guitars battering the vessel of impulses born in research. Fabiano articulates thoughts with luculent impetus, scraping away banality.

The sounds curate the overkill, unravelling in the school of a mode that favours a strange form of 'catchiness': some refrains seem to favour the expression of 'gothic pop in search of imprecise smears', a mode that can bring even those less accustomed to these climatic and sensory inclinations closer to these lyrics that probe and bring to light a ravenous need to freeze truths.

Five words are repeated twice, generating a planimetry of mental addresses.

Heart - Eyes - Life - Back - Dream.

Here they are, these mammoth queens, piloting a precise order of intentions in the chaos of a slight cut-up.

The music does not perform panegyrics, it could not: it reveals, represents, seduces, hammers, scratches, connects the mood and smells of that writing with which it dialogues, fights, establishes blood pacts. Tony's querulous bass guitar manages to bring the auditory apparatus closer to the hammering with big breath. Mirko's drums are sly, using impervious, stubborn hand tones, where imaginative counter-rhythms, stop-and-go and probing percussions establish the effervescence of a whole that seems to escape itself. Then there is the considerable amount of space that the musicians allow themselves, the pauses, the entrances and exits that act as glue to the intentions. 

The Silent Lineage does not follow the pilgrimage of widowed bands of the past, nor does it go back to rummaging through the stars and rubbish, nor does it leap into the future like a drunken kangaroo. It defines immediacy, it documents, knowing full well that fools seek out references, preventing them from identifying truth and reality.  And it is here that the band shows its loyalty, its ability to fall into the restrictive funnel of musical genres, preferring to adopt the sweat, the silence, the chaos that unites souls in the ravenous territories of rehearsal sessions. We witness, therefore, the release of the seed of their greatness, that uniqueness that links research and sodomises indifference. 

The brevity of the compositions offers the possibility of better historicising the scratches, the bumps, the bows to dreams, fraudulent, lukewarm, diving into life with little breath.

They play, they paint, they mess around with history by addressing themselves to a restrictive mode: they do not need redundancies, bumpy effects to nullify feelings. Here, I would emphasise that the compactness stems from erasing the assumption that their music is a sonic promenade, like clothes in search of applause.

Absolutely not: whoever listens to these eight songs sees a few rays, but in their power the truth is grasped and exposed to torture, which is magic (not white, let alone black), allowing the artistic apparatus to be a precise prophylaxis of a search that cures pain.  When what is experienced is without instructions, disorientation becomes the most sublime joy: getting lost becomes a resource and Sacred Legion know how to regroup the senses, in the disharmonic and marvellous nocturnal wanderings, with subtle but powerful insights. The album interrogates, it exhorts, it does not pretend, it offers shamanic propensities to the rejection of history in its manifest violence and, to better index the listening, it structures the music around seasons that, as they mix, fall, become unrecognisable. Winter is the season of these perceptions. Let us now follow their footprints and thorns, one by one...

Song by Song

1 - Flower Phantoms 

The entrance of this volcanic process is slow (the song with the longest minute count), like a strategic nuclear move, it enchants with a guitar arpeggio and a martial march of the drums, to obsequious sound in the tinkles that surround the perceptions. Then, like a scimitar slipping through the veins, the acceleration is witnessed and it is a leap into the belly. The seeds are sown, in the refrain, of a modality that envisages two voices in the song, as if to swell the listening for a better reception. Pillar, lead, indicative of a direction that will expand its energetic propensity for scorching sounds.

2 - Back to Nowhere

The three become privateers, the guitar and bass marry the electric dance, with the rhythmic carpet reducing the snares and offering powerful, dry beats. These are epidermal scratches that create a collision, shattering cognitive space, returning, in the end, to a place capable of dispersing every cardinal point.

3 - Purify

The melodic, initial search presents an approach to courtesy, to the ease of those who suffer this kind of sonic propensity. But the band refuses to be simplistic and tosses off the beginning in the swirl of ravenous, wounded sounds as they lose gravity. Right here, in these few seconds, the drumming twists the steps of the rhythm and becomes the sovereign ruler over the guitar and bass. The singing knows discretion, diving into the misfortune with elegance, without screaming, following the lead of the words...

4 - Dig Me No Grave

Centimetres and metres of glam rock precede the progression, allow the bass to pine away in an epic distortion and then away, as in a day of pain without a thermometer, into the exponential confines of an ankle-hammering horror rock.

5 - A Taste of Turmoil

Gravity slips, the track becomes a post-mortem recital, an ordeal of jolts, bringing to mind the graffiti of Killing Joke's second album and the first vague sounds of Southern Death Cult, but nothing settles in those heavy boulders and, as a forced choice, the three sailors decide to invent sound waves that lead them into the earth's subsoil: speed, which seems to be the pilot of this shipwreck, is actually given by the writing of a lyric full of radioactive miracles.

6 - Black Sun Ritual

Echoes of CCCP's Punk Islam open the dances, putting distance between them and the Emilian band. Everything becomes mystery, the blood comes out, the slowness, the sonic crescendo establishes a strategic plan: everything must arrive like a hypothesis and become precise like a form of prayer. A hiss pilots the impetuous action and the sonic rarefaction descends to meet the bass that uncovers the past of this sonic rush. Instead of the guitar, it is Tony's instrument that is grating. As a challenge, to be decisive, the song offers ample musical challenges, with Fabiano's vocals disappearing towards the end, as if sucked into a strange, mephistophelian ritual.

7 - Hole In The Heart

The bang above the sky of Frosinone: with the attitude of a hard-core cluster of inches, the track presents the coexistence of ardour and rejection, with the sounds perfectly circumscribing the words. In the stylistic search, note how the track suspends itself, returning to the scratch of the initial harmonic turn to accommodate a brilliant female voice that disorients and conquers.

8 - Shards

We come to the end of this cursed fresco in a state of grace with the song offering its sides to various, probable and obvious juxtapositions, but Old Scribe rejects them. The three do not seek originality, peaks from which to look down on any defeated colleagues. Instead, they throw themselves into the lava labyrinth to leave a trail of hissing roughness, to stun, certainly not to bewitch, thus giving the composition a brilliance that distinguishes it from the others. It experiments, seizes the chance of a becoming and writes the future of this band that made its debut by making the night tremble...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

6th March 2024

https://batcaveproductions.bandcamp.com/album/the-silent-lineage