My review: Edna Frau - Slow, Be Gentle I Am Virgin

 

Edna Frau - Slow, Be Gentle I Am Virgin

In the chaos of unease, there is a silent counterpart and a planned friction, which unleashes the acrid taste of anger, like a stubbornness that must be exposed, already crucified.

The band Edna Frau amazes once again, for a very unusual fact that must necessarily be explained.

The debut album of almost five years ago, My Ego is Bigger than Yours, seemed like a second if not even a third work, due to its elaborate propensity to move within multiple zones, as if in search of a musical airport where the flood of ideas could be exposed, presenting the pleasing difficulty of accommodating great songs but perhaps structured as an act of presence. Not a flaw, for goodness sake, yet in its incandescent beauty one finds it hard to linger.

Instead, one now seems to be at a crossroads to be crossed with red and black, without delay, with that youthful impetuosity that wants to stir the waters of heaven.

It is a robust, red-hot, passionate and suffered project, but the pain is not a lament but a benevolent form of integration with the developments of dreams, nightmares, ascertainments, ironic attestations and the guise of a reduced musical mixture that is nevertheless more capable of insinuating itself into the reception of a listening that is educated to consider the transformative bases of a post-punk connected in a diminished way to the electro-dark that was very present in the debut tracks.

One thus finds oneself in the wandering journey between Germany, the US and England, like a lamp that blinds one to see only what is essential.

It is astonishing how Vins Baruzzi's lyrics and Andrea Fioravanti's music are able to exert the need to look towards the back of time and place.

The points of contact take us back to the exciting interlude of the German Stimmen der Stille, as well as to Actifed, Brotherhood of Pagans and the early Sound. 

But it is only a feint, an excuse, because the boys use music as rockets, reflexive, to strike at the stagnant inactivity of the brain.

This explains the guitars' choice to be searing acid that fires notes like a bayonet, and the vocals that in their theatricality rediscover Killing Joke for the time to create stories in which the captivating nastiness is only the beginning of a fire.

Music like an inescapable shave, with the hot backbone of events filled with saturated disappointments. The band sounds like weathered ivy, carrying its vitamin load in the frustrations of drumming that doesn't make us dance but rather rummage through our need to take melancholy elsewhere. The bass is a factory of black oil, which retains the flavour of the eighties, while the guitar throws us into the silence of fingers that speak a language that leads us to welcome a cultured soul in front of a glowing, flickering mental palace.

The voice and the mode of singing is a bouncing labyrinth, fleshing us out and bringing us back to attention, harbouring a sweetness elaborated by lyrics that, at last, sentence, and morality is exposed, as it should be.

For these reasons alone, this work should be mummified in our ears, developing, consciously, an inspirational and devoted thanks. Richness and din here clearly outnumber the six artistic creatures: the sensation is that of standing in the desert temple of a silence that raises its curtains, as each track has in its DNA a fertile sense of scrutiny, of disgust, manifesting an allergy to pop and taking, overbearingly and marvellously, the possibility of becoming hypnosis, in the perfect marriage between expressive art and listening.

A crazy record, for the abundance of rational ecstasy, for the inputs of memories that seem topical, for the theatricality of the musical set-up that brings together the electric dance and the refined mixture of mature rock in a grey coat and black lapel.

And when the stylings bring us back to Old Scribe's beloved Belfegore, we realise the coexistence, in a less exaggerated way than on the first album, of that magnetic wave of electro bands from the nineties that conquered dance halls but not the soul...

The record's American space is noticeable when points of contact with the Californian outfit Burning Image are found: and it is a smile of the chest as it rent scratches in the mind.

The energy of these six songs goes beyond beauty: the band's good taste to be less dispersive has marked the coexistence with the directness of their inner feeling.

Perfection has been achieved: having definitively abandoned the idea of an Italian musical space, the boys become pilots of an emotional space that is richly matched to the mental one: they flee, they make people flee, and then attend, in the tamed but elaborate song form, to their denial in the album's central crater, which we will analyse in a moment.

Significant, in the singing of almost all the refrains, is the juxtaposition, noble and relevant, with the expressive mode of Mark Burgess of the never forgotten The Chameleons.

But it's only a moment: Vins feeds on his imagination and marries Andrea's stratospheric textures by rummaging through his present. Here is yet another surprise, the impetuous ability to oust comparisons.

The musical notes are all words pregnant with urgency and method, the lyrics are sonic amplexes that hold patience by the lapels: a record that is in a hurry but is made for souls who know how to expand their calm...

Let us now turn to the approach of every chip in this work: make room and embrace this band because tears, the best ones, are never respectful…

Song by Song

1 - The Laundry Of Sins

‘If you need colour sin wash

or are you here for black or white?’

A searing run, basted by a venomous bass, leads us to hear a singing mode close to the Damned's good Vanian, while the corrosive guitar structure seems to hide. Instead it is a poison that matches the lyrics, a slap in the face of other people's existence, vulgarity and attitudinal filth. A majestic stage where well-structured dynamic ups and downs are wisely displayed and, in the absence of false elegance, the band veers towards total and devastating sincerity...

2 . Slow, Be Gentle I Am Virgin

‘It's time for my heart to know who you are’.

The syncopated rhythm might convince us that the set is about to slow down in intensity but, really, we witness its resounding opposite: the emphasis comes in the croaking bass, in the singing at a higher and only seemingly more melodic vocal register. The drumming is a set of shafts that serve to capture the exciting exposition of an ancient post-punk in search of revenge. The title, ironic and sarcastic, is just a drop of a rational ocean that, like a bandit, desires not approval but victims...

3 - See Me

“Taking off with your dreams

throwing away problems”.

We go to Germany, we vibe with a propensity for drama that teases patience, with the collapse of the wall of visibility, with the immense approach (which is never a didactic trick) of a refrain that embraces the black forest and the most meditative Dusseldorf. An anomalous ride of a guitar that sticks to noise and evasion in a spectral way...

4 - Again

'Again a bad choice

they will be tests of survival'

A jewel in the odour of Echo & The Bunnymen in its beginning, but then capable of pausing in the earthquake zones of a more current guitar style, with darkwave inclinations and reverb-soaked soul. The most exasperated episode of the entire project offers us the possibility of reflection through the perfect interplay of expressive swings. Epic, devastating, suffocating, the song is the cherry, in the process of hypnosis, that sends the food bolus into the channels of our mind.

Absolute gem with a finale that sounds like something out of Juju by the Banshees...

5 - Day One

'Describe all your feelings and fears'

And here the seeds of the first album reappear: the attention in the expressive mixture leads us to hidden but pulsating electronics, while the vocal-guitar duo creates an abundant inclination towards metaphysical abandon. A chase, an exasperating cry is accumulated in this simple but granitic sequence of chords. The sound thus becomes the soul of a mortality seeking refuge...

6 - Working On Myself

“Too many thoughts are running in circles inside me”.

The conclusion features a guest, a familiar element from his artistic journey in Sorry Heels.

The track is a cacophonous ballad, a slow cry, an excruciating dance step in the electronic echoes and vapours of an electric drumming that inhabits the impervious zones of slowness.

The feelings of the drama are exposed with snowy pop stigmata of despair, to deliver to the conclusion the respect given by inevitable reflections.

Radiophonic (obviously for circuits interested in the dissemination of a trained rage), magnetic and fluctuating, almost two steps away from a dreamlike aspect that never before presented itself.

An astonishment also offered by a rhythm that, when slowed down, allows us to hear the band's electro-dark variants.

When melancholy creates a smile, the atmosphere becomes a prolific graft for remembrance...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

20 June 2025

Vins Baruzzi - Vocals

Andrea Fioravanti - Guitar player and multi-instrumentalist

Federico Guardigni - Drums

Dario Foschini - Bass player

22 Dicembre Records

https://ednafrau.bandcamp.com/album/slow-be-gentle-i-am-virgin

My Review: God in a Black Suit - Thresholds

 

God in a Black Suit - Thresholds

There is an ancient perspective, rooted in autumnal paths, that sustains and pushes memory to be a fertiliser of time. And there are places that have the exact, intense, pure skin to sustain this. Matera is a rock that lives high up, not by the sea but by the clouds, capable of nourishing, generation after generation, people and artists devoted to coming out of those places. A perfect band to make it all clear is the protagonist of its second episode, after the eponymous debut album, here in a total and embarrassing state of grace: to be able to make their compositions sound like angelic flights of distant stratagems is truly a miracle, one that makes Italian music truly fortunate.

The formation, so seemingly distant from Basilicata, with these tracks instead cushions the pain of the desire to take possession of dreams that move it and takes flight, entering, specifically, into a sensory mutation in the way the songs are conceived, structured and finalised. An evident growth, which materialises their impetus, in a sort of forced education in order to achieve a status quo where sound can reign, initiate and structure these melancholic humoral folds in search of light. A race into the old zones of a Germany that in the mid-1970s was already creating crossovers, to make purity only a dress, but not the core of artistic inclination.

The Materana band makes people jump, induces memory to become fertiliser and cure, a dance floor of the soul with the need for nocturnal seeds. What remains of this line-up is the desire not to be encompassed in the gothic ghetto, especially the Italian one, as (clearly) all compositions are glimpses, listenings, dynamics of dreams that aim to fix well-being and meaning not in a precise genre, but in a zone where everything is fluctuating and not rigid. 

Undoubtedly streams of magnetic post-punk sprout and stun, but it is never definitive, let alone overpowering. Thus, precious metals are found in the stones of the group, five painters of fairy tales with the intention of making bodies vibrate but, above all, of sowing tension, sweetness, to make the whole a more complex perimeter than it might seem at a quick listen.

No, take it easy: with God in a Black Suit you have to be slow, devoted to patience, feel their nomadism enter desert rock, as well as post-rock, even touching on little-known 1970s American psychedelia.

If you practice it, you will notice how the band always gives the impression of isolating each individual instrument in order to direct it towards personal exaltation.

Annalisa Laterza's bass guitar is sandpaper, a heavy guillotine with twisting sides, capable of sending notes to the belly.

Bruno Pantone, guitar and lyrics, is a fakir, an elegant trapeze artist who draws traces in the sky, holding in his fingertips a long trail of masters to whom he does not bow, offering, instead, complex plots that are at the same time as simple as a breath.

Gianluca Natrella seems to arrive from Boston, on a day when boredom is to be surrounded with metric kindness, but also with that strength that structures the pleasure of sustaining time through his deadly drumsticks.

Matteo Demma, vocals and lyrics, is an anachronistic elf, his voice shifting between terroristic and cautious registers, between whispers and guttural tombstones.

Finally, Pietro De Ruggieri, with his synthetic carpets, succeeds in compacting the torrent of neurotic impulses with majestic elegance: you might think he is often absent, but instead he is there to hinge it all.

A continuous hypnosis of ancient shadows and modern lights, with nerves that brush against loyalty, break it down and flee, like angels without fears. When they pick up the pace, you can almost feel the existential itch, the loneliness and anxiety searching for oxygen, images and places on which to breathe a refined sonority. The lyrics, written by four hands, are a mapping out of this sound brick and cylinder that knows how to get the tactics right too: the set list is perfect in that there is not the age-old problem of alternating slower songs with faster ones, but the will to make tension a way, a goal, a stubbornness that makes this line-up truly unique on the Italian scene.

The interplay of voices, the countermelody with the female one, the solos placed at strategic points of the album make us realise the breadth of their imagery. A volumetric, eclectic tapestry with innovative audacity that fully preserves the memory of long listens that are here translated, explored and finally evolved.

The main richness comes from the seemingly raw aesthetics, however, it must be admitted, the production becomes a wise glue to offer refinement and the play of alchemical temporal threads.

A work that lends itself to study: the individual tracks are paths, but at the end of listening an unthinkable space materialises in the soul. Pain, frustration, fatigue here are not a list, a cry, but the principle of a revolt, of a moral passport to be invented, and the five demonstrate compactness and mutual loyalty.

One glides through the hands, between shivers and amazements, to silence boredom, because, undeniably, in this artistic minutiae we find spiritual intersections.

All that remains now is for us to pick up each of these compositions and give thanks for their content...

Song by Song

1 - Thresholds

‘There are Thresholds beyond, where time does not matter’.

A dusty guitar and a constant tear build an arpeggio to begin a long discourse that will expand with the other tracks. The crooning, initially in English, ends in Italian, while the arpeggio continues to remind us of the ambient post-rock of the second half of the 1990s. It's anticipation, it's mystery, it's slow, wonderful thunder...

2 - A New Life

‘The weight of these days is bearable, I don't need a normal life’

Acidic petals come out of a cage and run with trepidation, in the rapacious capture of a new existence, while a mixture of Killing Joke and Au Pairs makes us feel we are in a cellar of a distant time. But in the refrain we realise a freshness that the solo that comes immediately after enhances. It is metamorphosis that seeks a climate. And it will find it...

3 - To Forget

‘I've forgotten all the affection from you’

The singing governs the prestige of fingers capable of visiting the New York sound dear to the lovers of No Wave and then displacing us by means of sonic bushes that bring us to the present day, with the talent that forms a meeting of centripetal forces towards the rocks of the city of Matera: it is a frothing-at-the-mouth race, in a misleading hallucination, perfectly lubricated by the semi-pop tone of the refrain...

4 - I Remember You

‘I stay here completely alone, licking my wounds and counting my scars’

Manchester calls, Matera answers and London applauds. With Borland's Sound weeping and embracing the Matera band for this exploration that, beginning with a sexy yet vibrant bass, brings dream pop feathered guitar to the fore. And it is rapid ecstasy, to be experienced while the drumming, like Belgian memories of the best coldwave, synthesises the souls and connects them to perfection. If The Edge had been more interested in varying his style, here he would have embraced Bruno Pantone...

5 - Dirt

‘All you touch turns to dirt’

There was the new Welsh psychedelia, at the dawn of the nineties, trying to marry with the nefarious, slow and agonising textures of the Dirty Boys, in a dangerous and skilful mixture. The harmonic succession leads to a limited distortion, with the drums being a whip that punishes and governs the balsamic wave of a vocal that, like a spirit under the effect of a mental acid, defies chemistry, taming it. The pinnacle of the entire work is positioned here, with the seductive succession of notes starting with Southern Death Cult and gliding up to Gorky's Zycotic Mynci.

6 - One More Time

‘Silence like a bomb, I can't think, just one breath and another’.

There is no shortage of primitive industrial movements crossing over with American shoegaze, all oiled by a sinister texture that one suspects could kill the tranquillity of an innocent thought. Poisonous, high-pitched, the song shows how the travelling latitudes of their style is a non-stop sky light

7 - Sunshine

‘All on fire everywhere’

Kitchens of Distinctions and early Church are enraptured by the fact that the earthquake pill that grafts itself onto the nerves is Italian: the sound, opaque, unnerving and vibrant, translates spiritual textures and leaves it to the bass to bombard the melody to extinguish the night...

8 - Whisper

‘Air and sun, which I've never looked for’

The water of thought climbs the stairs: a dirty guitar craves the tracks of a bass that simplifies the lyrics, while the voices, here often doubled, generate a series of sensory windows that, starting from Peter Murphy, reach the Catherine Wheel's house, on a day when the sun strikes...

9 - Invisible

‘I lag behind, I'm not in step’

When the song becomes a lair, the breaths become precise: as if it had been birthed by the Adorable of Vendetta, it tries to spite and go into hiding and create its own identity. The contrast of the male voice with the female voice gives compactness and dreaminess, while cognitive installations of a piece that tries to write a new story for the group become evident. Hence its freshness and uniqueness, a broadening of the ropes of possibility almost knocking on an indie pop that waits voluptuously for the Matera combo not to leave...

10 - Together

‘Our love is a big cage, from which I don't want to escape’.

Where did we start from? From the band that had rocked the world with Nag Nag Nag: Cabaret Voltaire. The Matera-based line-up does the same: it starts with something known in order to fly into the unknown, in a truly well-structured nomadic process, calling upon a plethora of butterflies made up with eyeliner and pink nail polish, to polish up comparisons that can be avoided. Here it is the backbone that wins, the crass matter of a sword that wounds the skin and reminds us how Bauhaus never ended their earthly presence. Here, then, is the continuation of that now mythological affair paired with the recent Bambara, perfectly uniting Britain and America. A delirium like a mantra to be oxidised, totally...

11 - Goodbye

‘You don't know, you are paralysed, you don't know why, will you survive?’ 

Art can create itches, make the skin redden and bone up, which is all well and good. The pace remains high here as well, but one is sure that the quintet could not do without the talent of decomposition, in a frenetic and morbid puzzle, to finalise everything in a magnetically fixed drift forever...

12 - Breath

‘We will love each other, without limits or constraints, I want to dream’

A sly guitar, a damp bass, dry, moody drums and the amniotic, cruel voice at its altar are the protagonists of a composition that surrounds the English shoegaze of the early days and seeks a psychedelic arm to renounce excess. Recollected, subtle, the song presses memory and unites three decades in a bridge where the eyes notice, between the lanes of a very brief arrangement, the band's future...

13 - End

‘We had nothing, and nothing had that sound’.

The pain comes, like a sentence: the album must end and the boys explore the sound, the play of chimes, syncopated rhythm and the sting of a paralysing wait. It sounds wide, the composition, like a night scope after an endless rain. Bass, drums and voice find themselves amidst the delicate but heartbreaking chimes of a guitar that makes us weep. In this exploratory rarefaction, the slowness becomes a thrill that sentences: this band has touched its perfection, like a definitive gift for our existence...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

15th May 2025

https://godinablacksuit.bandcamp.com/album/thresholds

https://open.spotify.com/album/47iKT2U28JPKhuewrlM3Pk?si=Y3DHwOHvQDm90J8fSOyvxw

https://music.apple.com/gb/album/thresholds/1810903637