My Review: Chants Of Maldoror - Ritual Death

Chants of Maldoror - Ritual Death

A bee's nest dwells in the crater of the sky, aboard a vehicle that transports it between different forms of entry into studies and patrols, and in which four insects make us aware of what is happening. Time, spectres, telluric trends, suspicions, dramas, religious debate, respect for death, assassinations, wise human genuflections, the pitfalls of existence: this is only the beginning of this exhibition of boiling matter, where the content turns out to be a sound beam that unleashes spirits and sets them free, through contaminations and apparently indigestible fluids, with a blackness that becomes the light to see the intensity of a process that knows evolution and its opposite.

The four bees from Frosinone and the surrounding area put on a cassette the magnetic mixing and procession process of a weeping enchantment, a traversal of the known and lesser-known conditions of grief, of the symbolic fascination dear to these minds pregnant with interest, giving the occult, the probing of signs, the belligerent bubble of discoveries the task of making it all a matter only apparently related to music. Listening involves the sacrifice of personal turmoil, an unexpected detumescence, an unexpected, violent, never approximate healing rite, within a funereal manipulation that sees two genres of music not being the sense but the means through which things are shown rather than heard, thus giving astonishment the chance to be matter on display, a new excuse for the doors of perceptions to exhibit a long dress full of lace of souls truly capable of not being afraid.

Seven rough-skinned candelabra wander the aisles of space, making us feel their breath, in a tangle of tensions and excruciating pains that seek no consolation: we are so inebriated before such intensity and introspection that, at the end of listening, we seem to have experienced a series of mirages in which the celestial vault has wanted to deliver heavy but necessary secrets for the awareness of a knowledge that has become, track after track, more than necessary.

Welcome, then, to the grandchildren of the Count of Lautréamont, who lay their sonic garland on the planks of a bleak, excruciating theatre, full of splinters and claws, in which the rhythm, the form, the density of the songs fill the whole with pride and devastation. In Italy, such a perceptive quality had never before been experienced. There is no need to catalogue, to throw these wise creatures into the cauldron of silly definitions, but rather we should all find ourselves in the emotion of a psychedelic and alchemical journey through an uncovered temple, like an enchantment that can be touched.

It is useless to go fossilising our curiosity within what can make us remember what we listen to here: it seems to me rather more correct to become studious souls who want to capture every atom of this absolute gem full of uniqueness to be found, between sacrifices and thorns on the head of our heart, never afflicted but pulsating with stars containing secrets in the process of emerging.

Adolphe, David, Echo and Loren are the emissaries, the ravens of caves in constant eruption, the architects of this wandering that makes our ears tense, feverish and fearful. Their hands, their uvulas, their propensities are a daring, a defiance, a concept, a war weave that leads us to the truth that in its uncomfortableness embellishes us with pathos that greases our skin and our thoughts. 

Travellers of time and unknowns, the Chants Of Maldoror seem to be millenary spirits with an impeccable and extraordinary vitality: despite the quantity of meteors exploded in their hands, the writing is orderly, concentrated, capable of a macabre but astonishing smile, a miracle in the centre of gravity of their graces, processed, put in order and exposed like explosions in the core of continuous metamorphoses.

Having started out as emissaries of the Middle Ages, intent on knowing the rituals that horrify most people, these young people who are already adults shift their intentions and plunge into an artistic will that only apparently appears more ‘comfortable’: in reality they become even more devastating, tremendous knights of battles and clashes with the motions of the soul, rebellious scholars, indifferent to their surroundings, splendid concentrates of whims and obstinacy to which we find it easy to be obedient, to transfer knowledge into the process of experience.

A decadence that turns into a place where resignation, limpid, knows impetus, and frustration manages to turn into a marvellous joy that is more atypical than ever. 

The show knows rules, circumspection, suffocating turmoil, states of perdition, within a plot that is never confusing but only becomes untenable for the ignorant and the deliberately superficial-minded. Bullets, brambles, prayers with no gods to reach, bows and devotions with complex languages: this is the gift offered by the four without requiring sacrifices but pointing out, in each composition, that listening can generate promiscuity and abandonment of wills, in a rapture that does not leave one defeated.

Sound, a metal blade from the skin made sour by impenitent pains, is the king of it all, the main master, the anticipation of every slope that will be experienced through sequences of chords and rhythms that create a continuous roar and descent, to oxygenate the centre of the earth. The crooning, the recitative of the voice, the tones that are tangles of blood with books in hand, are the prerogative of Adolphe, priest of the dark, irrepressible scholar, actor and director of an inner theatre that makes one tremble. His most obvious quality is to make his voice the scourge of travelling souls, an intuitive pupil devoid, however, of ties with those who have gone before him, in order to settle, untamed, on the throne of beauty.

Loren is an alchemist of melody, an experimenter, a disciple of black beauty, untamed, with an impetus full of salt and mixtures, like a druid who studies the elements of nature and transfers them to his six strings.

Echo is a sound bubble that stretches across the black and white keys of a synth and a piano, to regulate the temperature of pain and create emotional planes where everything is adjacency, a pact of structures that marry with other musical forms, to give the whole sacredness.

David is the governor of instincts, the gatekeeper who opens up the noise of the earth and brings it inside the evil mechanisms of Loren and Echo, a trapeze player of his instrument, which to call bass is totally reductive. It is up to him to manoeuvre the moods, to pilot the emotional beams inside the belly, to stabilise the magnetic waves of a band that seems to be an eighteenth-century orchestra, devoid of inhibitions.

What is most astonishing about COM's music is that one finds oneself in front of brushstrokes of sound on the canvas of life, for an art that seems different from music, like a misunderstanding that nevertheless unites different entities. A creative process that compartmentalises knowledge in relation to styles that have been stiffened by adoration, in which the critical process is lacking. The four, on the other hand, do not make Death Rock or Gothic Rock, but rather moisten knowledge with paintings that disintegrate all convictions, rebels armed with the intelligence to be unwilling fragments of the ministry of those two musical genres.  Disobedient and anarchic, the boys enter the labyrinth of all tensions to destabilise years and years of conventions that they know make them useless. There is a pleasant arrogance on their part: not to be subjects, but unwitting rulers...

It is a wonder, and not a little wonder, that one cannot waste time searching for stylistic and cultural references with this group, as what stands out is a personal torture before the known, continually escaping in order to elevate knowledge in a field where novelty can be achieved.

I prefer to imagine this combo within a cultural space that starts from the origin of spirits, of impulses that elevate mankind, passing through the Middle Ages, to move to the heavens, in a jubilation of senses that expand a disease-like necessity that they live with positivity, worthy of the kiss of death that observes them smugly. They create a carpet of putrid encumbrances, appointments with chains and mental arthrosis, in the idyll of a grin that from evil becomes digestible.

Crossing abysses, they fix thoughts inside a mental crucifix in which everything is bowed and astonished, to release hypnosis and magnitudes in a constant way.

Let us gather, suspicious and trembling, around these seven candelabra, to put in writing, before worshipping them, our fears...

Song by Song

1 - Reunion and Death

‘I sink the knife in the mother's heart

and the capes grow scarlet from violet’.

Metallic cavities, vapours and fatuous fires enter the queue of an emotional funeral with Adolphe's recitative reigning over the sonic sparks pregnant with hallucinations from San Francisco Bay.

Much more than a theatre of sorrow: here, right from the start, one finds oneself catapulted into the din of an abandonment where the bewilderment is provided by acid guitars, with nuclear impetus.

2 - Feast In Black (Mortualia)

‘My soul is in shards, in and out of the way spot of my skull’.

The struggle of the denizens of hell becomes an inevitable sacrifice, and the voice, seemingly distant so as not to be reached, declaims inhospitable verses, death in its manifest triumph of the moment of the funeral allows the music to be ethereal but rebellious, with Echo's synth giving the idea of gloomy and melancholic paintings and the bass scanning every fear...

3 - Post Mortem

‘Restless shapes are dancing on the blade of my knife’

Imagine, on a lightning-filled night, the Virgin Prunes dining with Bauhaus, amidst bickering and impertinent laughter, in swinging adoration of violent gestures commanded by the COMs with great intelligence. Gloomy, grim, excruciating display of auditory discomfort in the rustle of bees working to cleanse the unknown within fear. Lancinating parade of sounds gluing to the slimy glass of swelling consciences....

4 - Resurrection

‘Resurrection is real death!’

One goes to Frankfurt, to knock on the door of Varney Cantodea's house, to see her dancing happily, to this composition that comes from the 18th century, while, after a bath of modernity, she sacrifices herself in a short but effective movement. Religion is challenged, reduced to an avoidable misery, space is made for the perennially denied millenary truth and the obvious finds the manifest light of the heavenly vault. Redundant without distortion, the song is the miracle of Gothic seduction at its finest...

5 - Baptism Until The Angel

‘Doesn't appear the lost image of the end’

Neurotic tremors, blades on Loren's neck, weed in the voice of Adolphe, here a black magician of death, a messenger with studs in his heart, as he launches himself into the grooves of the bass and drum machine, with the guitar investigating and creating pertuosities...

6 - Red Communion

‘With Angels crucified on red roses in bloom’.

The scenery changes, we find ourselves in a church hypnotised by Echo, an advancing teacher and painter: after a few seconds the track becomes a sensory hallucination in the presence of paranoia, to capture human sleep and catapult it into the abyss of time. Martial, dark, unrepentant and evil, the composition minimises melody and harmony to be chaos and paralysing genuflection...  

7 - Requiem Aeternum

On the eternal rest the band dissolves a cloud of sound that fogs the hearing and plunges us into despondency, in a rhythm that nails while the voice makes the skin crawl and the mind wanders lost in the limbo of the unknown. Sounds like cold corpses, where only the bass at the end seems to remind us that we are listening to something ‘human’.

A surprising farewell that fixes the band's value where no one will expect it, because those who precede live the grief of incomprehension...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

12th May 2024

 

Links song by song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlxCiH0yDMU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ps7VmXJjy4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA4O1Za6bVQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDyevx7xIWI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzBUMKnk63c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o6_mB18E2M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt-r54BtZ1o

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