My Review: Noktva - Icarus

It’s all there!

Everything that marks on the skin of intelligence the sense of belonging to a sonic miracle to be appropriated as one does with the keys to a house, to be able to enter and enjoy what one desires.

The sky to be perfect has created swallows, to bring freshness and truth to our eyes.

The latter feed on souls to accompany that flight with their own. 

So what happens here?

We are inside a musical affair that, together with the lyrics, gives the impression that the Sicilian band's growth is already a given, we find ourselves undoubtedly immersed in their newfound dizziness, finally happy with their reasoned suffering translated into a simply perfect stage cataclysm.

Having understood the mythology of Icarus, we can better disentangle ourselves from the extrasensory tale of this tangle of images that render sublime cognitions concerning love and time, dreams and everyday limits.

A joy that is not only representation but also exploration, in a movement that stretches the sky and mortifies selfishness.

Icarus is an anti-hero, here elevated to a speaking conscience, a communicator through a cloud-covered din that he passes through unscathed.  NOKTVA take off his parachute and make him aware of a path, at times devoid of gravity's acceleration, presenting him with the bill of his fate. In a latent and clearly sybaritic present, the band instead displays strength and richness, decision and facility for a result that turns us on the side of beauty. For when music succeeds in communicating the superfluous, one lives free, with the sole obsession of a bowed thank you. But in this agglomeration of sounds the five swallows also show the itchy seeds of instincts with reins awaiting command. The flowing growth displaces the need to define the genres present in this musical work: if you like, the current blackness has made them even blacker in soul, influencing Kurten and Miriam's singing towards Deathrock modes, while the growing structure of the track contemplates Post-Punk situations painted with a pliability and willingness to bring Darkwave macrocosms to bear.

But does it all serve a purpose? Would it make us understand it better?

Not at all.  Not an introduction, but the theatrical spectacle of a murderous affair that finds its proper tangle and repository in the notes.

A communicative act traverses the streets of preparatory rites, like this voice that looks up from below, from an intimacy that here is closed up to the harrowing scream that shakes the moon.

Then the bass, light at first and then desecrating, the synth and guitar, which is a flight of bees full of anxiety, rise up and wait for Kurten's postulate, grandson of a deathrock memory with bloody crosses, which allows Miriam to penetrate the text where, from the beginning, the intention to think and address another time, that of the temple of dreams, is clear.

Continuous crossings of blades and drums dishearten the serenity of those who do not care about the events, the mythological flows that still lend themselves to being elements of induction without rhetoric.

They are not instruments but mental patrols that seek to witness the failure of a man not a man, of a flight not a flight, in its precipitation not only into the void but above all into the flow of the millennia. 

Where is his place? His role?  Noktva mortify the ugliness of those who do not care about Icarus and engrave it in their own skin, even before in a song that manages to make the beat murky. 

An international reality without a passport for illusions, just as for the protagonist of this story, an emblem of a purification with no strategy other than to save him.

The growth of Miriam and Kurten's singing work is a diabolical, surprising fuse, a magnificent manifestation of a union with no signs of frustration.

But to be such, the synchrony of souls with oil-soaked wings is the fruit of all five, eating up the same vitaminic propensity to stretch the sky of their dreams, their yearnings and sighs, always striving to cancel any visit to the surface of joy, so little use to these now adult and conscious children.

Traces of a temporal overtaking, compared to other Italian bands, are highlighted by the structure that does not envisage the song form as a stratagem to arrive at the pleasantness of listening, but wants to reach us through a plot, like a tale that develops in the earthquake of the disorder of a life that died before it desired flight.  Because, if you pay attention, Icarus is a dream, therefore a mental place, a private matter and structure. To be brought to light, the Sicilian band visited the sky, up there, beyond the stratosphere, where light is a scream without a window. And so the journey backwards is intuited (that guitar and bass are the magnets that bring order, while the synths are the lead-filled wings that give way, falling into the centre of the abdomen, to give the softness of happiness the nightmare of reality), and then make the leap forward

Everything is tense, perverse, on the run, underlining how music is the writing of the soul, which, in this case, starts as far back as Mythology.

A resounding album had sentenced the (undoubted) qualities of a great work, but here they have gone further: epic, dreamlike, dramatic, sensual, even in the face of a dead man predestined for the deception of human history. The five take care of him, give him a new meaning, give him a harmonic line full of that sadness that consoles and makes us feel at home. They enable us to visit the unknown, to simplify it, to spill tons of melancholy in simple verses but with the specific weight of a free-falling sky.  Icarus doesn't know whether to advance in the wake of the celestial face, and Miriam and Kurten invent an extraordinary stratagem: injecting the verses with smoke and blindness, to make any attempt to escape deadly, to consolidate the emotional labyrinth that permeates every inch of this composition. 

The walls are found to be wax paintings, but a far cry from those of Litfiba: here the invoice is not of geometric ordinance, rather a treatise that enters the musician veins of minutes deliciously filled with a fog that restores the sacrifice of Icarus, put by the group in a position to interrogate our minds. 

Jack's drumming is the seal that nails all music in being a funnel, into which Icarus tries to climb, not wanting to know the immensity of the void behind him. 

Such a piece is not born in a rehearsal room, from a jam, but from the persuasion of a path that needs the hands of time and patience. A seam, after a perfect tacking, gives us the immense construction that is not divided into stages but in growth, exactly like the career of this group to which we surrender our every dream: to see them on the roof of the world flying, fearlessly, together with Icarus, benefiting from our eternal embrace.  Maestro Alessandro Calovolo used to say 'And it is joy'.

I, with fear and modesty, would add:

"With Icarus it is freaky joy that falls from our feathers"....

In conclusion: get into the habit of leaving it in a continuous play, because it is only from total dependence not on a miracle but on hard and serious work that one learns how little it matters to listen to so much nonsense.

Take up residence in Noktva's house and you will have a sensible, fluent, dreamlike sadness in free flight...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

26th September 2023

https://noktva.bandcamp.com/track/icarus

My Review: Ohne Nomen - The S-Witch

Ohne Nomen - The S-Witch

There are vessels of liquid penumbras in thoughts, a slow wasp in search of guidance. Love, the pulsating one of uncontrollable spasms, seeks a force in the time of delirium, and it can be said that in art, specifically that of music, we can find an oblique flash, composed of a strategic plan that knows well how to involve the body in contact with the desire to sow tracks of silver dust, on which to run the conviction that it is the only correct thing to do.

Now at their second disc, the Italian pair has invested in a sound plot that appears to be a concept album, which in reality it is not, demonstrating rather the need to limit the field of possibilities in order to converge in a mantle on which to slide restlessness, hallucinations, symbolism, ending up gravitating around musical genres that are surrounded by their power: a work as an execution, as a transplant of sound waves to be introduced into the brain.

A journey that encompasses absences (from fear, to obscene vulgarity), contemplating instead the need to channel the destruction of the world as an oceanic, temporal tale, like diamonds fading in the sludge of everyday life. They are fierce shivers, one senses on their part the intention to make of essentiality a fist that, through melody, dance, knows how to prick the heart of existence, granting grace and warmth that through synths is not so much romantic as a vehicle of obsession. The tracks demonstrate the high capacity of the two to agree on strategies that can be cobwebs full of black honey, an agnostic mass in the sin of uncontrollable degradation. Fra and Philippe Marlat create a world of chasms for which it is easy to attract the senses, the embryonic macrocosms, to pay tribute to a highly emotive catchiness.

Pain becomes an opportunity to generate projects, with sinful and daring impulses, as the dress of a sphere involving feelings, instincts, like a magic with sharp nails. The rhythms are the terminals of melodic games full of a radioactive propensity for brevity to be repeated in dry riffs, with synths dominating, like allies of seeds from the 1980s.

Fra's voice is a silk glove soaked in oil: it makes the heart glisten, makes the mind clench, delivering a pleasantly toxic addiction. Light, like a feather that wants to be silent, she hints at short words, demonstrating a power that thousands of words would not be able to generate. The pair simplifies, invades the current vulgar will to give musical complication a meaning, destroying their adversaries with cascades of pure sparkling bubbles, in the fog of a time that grants no space for warlike disarmament. They shoot, shooting sound creatures clad in ancient magic, with Darkwave to which they put a black leather gag, giving the sinister Coldwave molecules a chance to rule the core of their hearts.  An album that will reach dancefloors in order to cast their gaze into the void and allow themselves the luxury of being afraid of this maturity that the pair has displayed with elegance and power, uniting the sky of defeated dreams with the dying heart of planet Earth...

Song by Song

1 - My Body is Moving

It all begins with a probe in the middle of the universe, a synth launching sweet missiles, then it all gets heavy and a cloud of asteroids becomes muscular, like steroids taking over our bodies. Synthpop imbued with intelligent electronics envelops us to feed the night with unexpected wisdom...

2 - Darkness

An electronic lightning bolt emerges from a grace-soaked synth, with the eye catching the nuance of a darkness, a nightmare waiting to be touched, and it is the magnetic and sensual voice of Fra Marlat, along with the work of his partner Philippe Marlat (Iamnoone), who carves a deep mark with his fingernails in this cloudburst of sound that falls from the celestial face. The two return and do so by writing a song that reveals an intimate propensity to combine different souls, a pact of strength that makes one wince as both the sung and played parts develop the alchemy of these creatures devoted to dark beauty. Fra has grown, a great deal: her voice is a lead feather breaking through the void, incisive, pragmatic, a queen of darkness painting her kingdom. Philippe is a talented machine with the intention of sweeping through the sea of possibilities: what he achieves is the marriage of melody and rhythm without any of the elements prevailing, for an indisputable final maturity. Synthwave, Coldwave, drops of Minimal Wave: it is not in these definitions that you will find the right amount of pain and fascination. Throw yourself into the ice-filled waves and the Gods of Thought, in a joyful way, will be the beacons of truth because this song, like an incredulous torch, will be able to make a small ray bloom, just enough for you to see the depths of this poignant track…

3 - Crystal World

With initial EBM petals intoxicated by a leaden Coldwave, we find ourselves in remembrances Italy Disco Dance of the eighties, with in addition a decadent mood totally current, for a dreamlike feeling as a trap for the inept, where the two probe the terrain of our thoughts. Voluminous display of a talent that can make stars dance...

4 - No Fear

A neurotic contamination (the intro is paralysing orgasm) sows bittersweet sadness, a welcome pass for a lack of fear that becomes necessary. On a robust Synthwave floor, the piece surrounds your thoughts and you find yourself in Electrowave atoms without being able to resist. It is a flight of sparks with a juicy burr that grazes us...

5 - Deep Hole

The synthesis of their musical narrative is revealed: a beat of desire overpowers every effort and we find ourselves in the deep hole of a contaminating dance, hints of singing, hints of playing, to manifest the contact between the essential and the epidermis of a dream capable of producing fatuous fires. When Coldwave gets rid of the genes of fear it becomes a stage for the Nordic part of our thoughts...

6 - Missing

Without respite, another missile loaded with electric Germanic propensity floods our breaths where, after a majestic introduction, we can unleash ourselves in spastic and generous dances. Musically, the track offers us the border between delirium and the robotic application of our pulsating bodies...

7 - Cold Sadness

The song Queen, the Goddess who petrifies breath, throws blades of ice at our legs, demonstrating how the marriage of different musical genres can generate benefit and cruel curiosity. Soft, with undulating movements of simple but devastating keyboards, it makes contact with the past possible and Fra raises her voice register, giving us shivers like star magnets…

8 - Thelema

The magician Philippe uses harmony like a gentle whip, with his Iamnoone reaching out to caress our hearts. Then Fra proves herself to be a performer without sweat in her thoughts, specifying her talent for imparting a poignant sensuality to the sonic mackintosh: you can dance while crying...

9 - No Lights

A comeback single, a decadent metaphor for our destiny, a producer of dark reminders of a past that has lost its dignity. They manage to give it back, letting us know that we cannot escape into the future without mourning lost opportunities. They extinguish the light of a millennium aggravated by sinful tendencies, with music that is a softened summer storm…

10 - Black Lies

A song that seemingly seems different from the others, instead reveals a talent for investigating the possibility of a widespread practice, that of lying covertly. But everything here is sincere, capable of accommodating us in the truth with an effective sound ensemble, where electronics support a sumptuous Synthwave...

11 - Lonelissen 

The pearl that closes this second work is an atomic, pulsating collar of a Post-Punk tested to generate points of contact with musical forms that are in their DNA. It takes us to the nerve centre of their talent, where everything appears to be a mysterious oasis but capable of arousing resounding gothic enthusiasm. One smiles with the tears that stick to these waves that, steeped in tribal minimalism, convince us even more of the clamorous display of class that is this album: give joy a black rose and lead it into the hypothermic desert of our desires...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

27th July 2023

https://on-ohnenomen.bandcamp.com/album/the-s-witch

My Review: Christabel Dreams - Pigs

 Christabel Dreams - Pigs

In the temple of loneliness, distraught shreds of troubled souls take the decisive step towards the declaration of their debts. There is an obligation: it is necessary to live the precision of falsehood, of the mask that guards against discourtesy. It would also be good to wear the coat that drops misunderstandings, sowing the strength needed to accept the dark sky of corrupt thoughts.

The Old Scribe had told you of a Roman trio, employed to paint the celestial face of the capital with splashes of melancholy, tidy and precise, to make us leap towards the celestial catacombs of human attitudes. It is from there that the last song comes out, which will be part of the long-awaited new album: let's hope it comes out as late as possible so that we can digest this gloomy beauty, with its procession, son of a wrong night in the eighties, the one that no one dared to record…

The piece in question is capable of bringing together a text made of molecules of sadness anointed with reasonableness and the propensity

 to separate silence from the madness of human delirium, while the music plummets into the void, light as it takes the pulse away. It may be because of connections of delicate musical genres, in the temple of a Synthwave that disturbs Post-Punk to impose an enchanting melody, with its dynamite coloured grey. Because everything has to do with the vulgarity of behaviours that taste of deception: that mask, of which the old scribe spoke earlier, is only the infected diadem of a grim suspicion. Nothing saves souls, least of all in the frozen space of a need contained and maintained by a bass that corrupts by its will to bind itself to the tribal drumming, wildly obscene, to make the rhythm section a mental seizure. It sounds like  New Year's Day by U2 in that piano that doesn't let go of the synth, the musical jumper, the one that warms the chest. Francesco and Emmanuele look up, turn their backs on the future and patrol sensual territories, where everything is a resource for a melody that deserves to be strung to the stars. Christian adds to the natural gift of a voice with a powerful and sensual timbre also the ability of a high register, almost shouted in the finale, to glue the shivers of this mind-twisting magnet. But, don't forget the theme, the path of the text, the denunciation, the taking of the bastille of the only truth of this modern life: to be destined to be like everyone else, with the same mask, the same burden, the same precipice. That all this is generated in the eternal city increases the discouragement, the nails scratch the dreams and one relies on the bass to meet the finished beat under one's shoes. 

Certainly the keyboard would seem to ground the guitars (and the band seems to have made the correct choice): the three have sufficient resources not to disperse what must be essential. Echoes of Psychedelic Furs bring us back to tears, the ones flowing from their first album, when the saxophone (nowadays badly used by Post-Punk and Darkwave bands) is offered the task of displacing thoughts by opening the dream lane. All this becomes a perfect contradiction that makes the song functional in confusing certainties. Pigs is a latrine, a street where lights are wasted and colours are boiled in the decadent formality of a denunciation. Maturity hurts as much as truth, and the message, from a bottle, passes through relationships made of luminescence without petals of shame. The world is freezing over, like a silent failure falling into laments entrusted to that very sax.  What remains? Unspoken words, capable of transforming into musical textures with solvent on the skin, to disappear in the magnificent custom of continuous listening, to make the song become a loop, like a perfect lover, to weep, to dissolve the fear given by the boundaries of the world with no more loyalty. Shivers that suspend every dream, and the singing is a weightless sad punch: the voice alone sinks the breath of listening...

One is stunned by the power, never a moment's pause, no small detail, the excellent choice of using the method of two voices in the verses, like a reverb and an echo to confirm the validity of the lyrics. In the refrain (the Roman band's highlight without a doubt since their debut), the voice seems to need no support as the bass, keyboard and drums are angels with powerful hands, albeit painted black...

The statement that disconcerts but becomes salutary is given by "We are used to falling in silence": I'm sorry to contradict the statement but with a song so immense, intense, true and raw, none of us can fail because if there is a joy, even a lopsided one, it is given by Pigs, definitively Italian Single of the Year for the Old Scribe.

And now? All that's left is for us to mute our emotions and disperse among the wandering, pulsating landmines of this Roman gem…

Alessandro Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

31st May 2023

https://open.spotify.com/album/79snihx4ijcQTXxlKE7eX0?si=6nRQvERtT2Ot_miOaTE9gg

https://youtu.be/MBuHrD1i2oA

My Review: Polina Suffer - Agonia Market

Polina Suffer - Agony Market

A row of electronic nails make the decision to go under the wounded rainbow of a great whirlwind: they are only two, but amply endowed with remarkable ballistic abilities, they can aim and hit the target, shaking the innate glow of every daily tragedy. A pair of young souls who dress the surface of dreams to disintegrate them with an imaginative maturity that exudes distant, perhaps even prenatal experiences, to rummage through the refuse of decaying impetuses. They debut to set fantasies on fire, amid fields of mental arthritis, subterfuge, masks, hypotheses and exhausting electronic machine guns with darkwave aftertaste. Words like voices rummaging through the dustbin of behavior, with a gothic feel among cobalt threads and vibrations that seem to come from the German experiments of the 1960s. A series of crossroads, of abrupt stops, amidst darkness that does not fail to erupt in fat mischievous laughter, while Beatrice, the girl with the long nails in her often atonal and then ringing uvula, registers the mental balance that Thomas, the mad sorcerer who sweeps away the detritus of boredom to channel it toward the ravine of no return, flexes to make us approach an ever-rising emotional state, in the disaster hanging beneath pregnant black clouds. The Old Scribe, the moment he discovers the sudden sweetness of which the two are capable, trembles and is frightened: the pair (Milan and Turin the cities that give the boys only the starting point) uses known techniques and then destroys them with pounds of faded, changeable, undigestible sugar and for that reason succulent and precious.

An album that does not sound like a debut given the remarkable sensory locomotive that runs on tracks resting on the ground as if the whole thing were one long time-travel. You marvel, you crash toward these melodies that fatten mournful thoughts, for it is the lyrics that ripen the greatest astonishment, almost unbearable, given an enormous need to visit topics that seem to have been soaked in literature, in history, in a lively and violent propensity for the fleshing out of all doubt. They don't joke, they don't play a game, but they play out their breaths as if they were a generous gift from maddened minds in tepid decay.

The heart cries, listening becomes an electrode, a welding between evil and the stubborn enemy, that good which in these musical tracks crashes. 

Conspicuous accelerations of rhythms, clusters of water vapor fogging the view as listening becomes an indecent, sublime, filthy affair, with reminders of musical genres that sound like hay in a hypothetical evening meal inside a barn full of skeletons. There is no shortage of the hardships of those living the young age in an old, decaying world, with food becoming less and less nutritious, with books and movies as anchors of salvation. But that is not enough, surely their souls are a spite to those who overtake life without cognition. They, on the other hand, plant their feet under the dust, under the earth, inside the mystery of pains connected to lukewarm nightmares...

It astonishes and astounds that after only two singles, and the project having been born for a short time, one can cross the border of a sick thought: will the whole thing be a lie? Will it really only be two and so young? The Old Scribe does not judge, he rests his tears on their skull rolling song after song on the tray made of transistors, guitars, lightning and corroding lava, to take us into the freshness of their walking pain. This explains the crazy accelerations, the Darkwave atoms flirting with Coldwave, in a temporal limbo of great fascinations, in order to stuff their needs with a poetry that seems to be screamed by Edgar Allan Poe.

Lend your ear to their amniotic curves, in the womb of a burden, in the poetry of a mental brothel, where only the mind, prostituting itself, releases useless toxins.

To begin an inevitable career in this way is to make many enemies, which is good and right, for there will be so many jealousies that will crop up in their circuit: do not halt your prodigy, for Polina Suffer is a new urgency, which will be the realm of many disordered souls...

Now is the time to enter, with fear and respect, within these songs, to die well with them....

Song by Song

1 Intro

A psychedelic lullaby, like a music box of daily suspicion, opens the non-dances: in these notes disturbed by calls of Virgin Prunes on military parade, one can recoil under nice thick blankets. No rhythm, just a devilishly hidden fairy inside water notes that seem to boil restless souls...

2 Dead Womb

Over drumming that brings to mind Wall of Woodoo experimentations and Sheffield-area post-punk guitars, the two souls sing uniting and leaving to Beatrice's voice the role of the sick bearer of the highest register, handing over to Tommaso's non-baritonal and deep role of being closer to the earthly crater. Guitars rolled in salt and red wine, celebrating a bloody womb, an existence that has yet to face this murky world...

3 Burnt

The beginning is a nocturnal sepulcher, waiting to let out an emotional hammer that dances to a distinctly American electro punk, with dramatic inlays closer to the D.A.F. of the latter part of their career. Stop-and-go games create continuous crackles in the legs that seem to fly, while Beatrice's voice whispers fears and tensions. The electronics here are a well-packaged cloak and mask: vocal echoes lean against derivative loops that like quiet screams stick to the listening. And it is definitely the first moment of total loss of control....

4 Aesthetic Drama

Look: you wanted surprises, magnitudes inside minimal wave suspensions? The platter is full of oscillations, evocations, when Belgium still had to give birth to Coldwave. Beatrice and Tommaso become actors, with a vocal that invokes the support of immediate but not too visible crooning to create a clip in the hair of thoughts. The whole is a gentle plug, with the drum machine slowly accompanying a synth in a state of grace...

5 Polina, Suffer!

The first of the two singles, in the context of the album, seems to have become a brick in the abdomen in the meantime: a wail that darkens dreams, with Beatrice's witch-like voice on acid that makes us skeletal, frightened souls destined for oblivion. The musical basis is a clear hypnotic imprint, a lesson perfectly learned (perhaps unwittingly) by the mammoth The Legendary Pink Dots. What then is special about this song? That the musical identity of the two Italian artists knows the phenomenon of awareness, of surrendering with weapons in hand though, not to say "enough" without having stained at least a little a synth that is a divine whim...

6 Obscura et Foetida

Do you remember Nag, Nag, Nag? Here is the granddaughter, born in Turin, fresh and eager to spurt towards your arms, amid the wails of childbirth. A syringe, an improvised anesthesia, and then a crescendo that becomes light out of the womb. Between English electro-punk (this time) and small particles of German synth-punk, the melody is a labored breath, a prayer approaching in the subtle texture. The two come together for the choral performance of a path that faces the demanding theatricality of Fura Dels Baus, in an obligatory feeling of imprisonment.

7 Plastic Regrets

The other single, a razor-sharp that concedes no defenses, with demonic laughter over a bass line coming out of the boiling basement of two lives connected in a lightning challenge, brings us to one consideration: a few notes are enough to enlarge the state of anguish that her voice can create. 

8 Harsh Flesh

Brian Eno walks through the garden of broken dreams, smoking an unease in search of a melody that is as decadent as possible. The dio spread their wings, cradle and fill the melody with the essential, a paranoia that tinges their fingers with a blackish sweetness. Slow, passionate but inevitably a slab that like a sword of Damocles takes away second after second of breathing space, it shines from the juxtaposition of instruments barking, as if stunned, in tender melodies...

9 We Were Just Lost Kids

A dump of nerves lodges within a dry harmonic line, echoes, bounces, as if Siouxsie and Budgie's Creatures had found a postdated sap, an absurd and Machiavellian need to move the hands of time. The groove seems to come out of glasses slipped into the jungle of the boniest Coldwave, to limit the spaces of escape. Perhaps the darkest track on this work, intriguing because it is elusive, quick to leave within us the certainty of a necessary chant. Like an electronic delirium deprived of electricity....

10 Desires

Death barks, thunders, spreads its wings, and Thomas becomes an engineer ordering music to be spastic, oblique, uncontrollable, with fascinations that seem to come out of any St. Petersburg music workshop. There it is, alive, the melody that needs a rust-filled synth to give us the dance amidst wishes with a chain around its neck. The stakes give the direction of disaster: you are in the early 1980s, in the wartime part of the delusions, where dreams and desires were whims and Post-Punk threw in the towel to become a parody of itself. But Polina Suffer resurrect, with their perverse beats, the need to end up in the abyss...

11 Whysteria

One definitely enters the clearest zone of this album: that of detonation, of the hysteria that spanks all joy and drowns it out, in the deadly vices that are strung together, like the musical genres here, in the circus that, starting from the Can's experimentation, changes the face, accelerates the rhythm and becomes a dance daughter of the Black Forest.

For the first time the bass comes out of Killing Joke's warbles, but the musical pattern is a continuous vocal, unchained in the fingers of the two young artists who improvise a scream that is a symbol coming from polite madness: the zenith is here in your ears...

12 The Blue Cathedral 

Darkness emerges from a slow cobweb, hypnotic and persuasive, like a stunned siren waiting to be decapitated. They surface, in the blackest jewel of Agonia Market, the pieces of listening that seduced the two in order to be included in the diabolical sound plan, with Virgin Prunes having sex with Danielle Dax, in a hypothetical Dantesque circle of deranged and deranged artists. The bells invoke the procession, sick, of a scene from a hypothetical Kubrick film, in the birthing night of a slowed nightmare. The chanting contrasts the sonic mantra, a slow motion to understand how it was possible to score a goal with pain in the chest. Siouxsie weeps, jealous, as well as any other star descending into retirement, because Beatrice and Tommaso cuddle the spite, draw, with an imperceptible guideline, sweetness and bitterness, to establish the place of consecration of a song that is nothing more than the collection of ashes thrown from the rose garden of the Turin hillside: the final act to dismiss all madness and create the tail in which to extinguish...

13 Outro

The end be damned: we find ourselves in a lightened industrial zone, where vomit comes not from drills but from blunt sheets, a terrifying appearance of a theatre that resides in the cradle of time, between East Germany and Russia, in a slow and irreverent duel filled with tension. There was no better way to end this record: don't go back to the first song, stay here, be good, play again on this vessel full of rusty nails, where every single sound is a labyrinth of minds with an expiration date. Let your joy be sombre, follow the chimes full of black sap out of these lopsided ways and get lost: this album is a wound we can all be proud of...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

26th May 2023

https://polinasuffer.bandcamp.com/album/agonia-market-2?from=search&search_item_id=2360249248&search_item_type=a&search_match_part=%3F&search_page_id=2621474286&search_page_no=1&search_rank=2&search_sig=a9844d7d339377970352100ba32b33c9