Lana Del Rabies - Blessed Witch
Sam An is a goddess who dwells beyond the stratosphere, occasionally appearing to ease our needs, and now we find ourselves with her third ampoule (again named Lana Del Rabies), filled with communities of olive, purple and orange rays with black breath. The nerves of her voice become decoded vocals that ride apnoea-ridden electronic splashes (Reckoning), stuttering sinfully, in a vegetative state of coma that we cannot make cease: the circuits of the synapses are comprehensible only to her, to us it is up to devotion, as the ancients used to do towards the divinities.
An album that seems like a collection of studies, notes of a perfectly structured jolt here, a dance of thought that annihilates history in order to corner it. An equation that does not lead to a result, but to a continuous tumult, with the Gothic spirit hovering in the night of a scorching full moon. Glimpses of witches sacrificed and made immortal by this masked Trip Hop (A Plague), which has tested its diversity by annexing experimental electronics gushing from chasms full of Noise. Altars for sacrifices under the hands of bats suspended in their flight, their breath held (Mother), so as not to interrupt any chaotic function. The breath-taking cloak becomes unbearably intriguing in the prodigious Mourning, the island of mystery that takes more than nine minutes to traverse, and where the inhabitants of a lost reflection, struck by discharges from mighty industrial cloaks, converge in a slow procession.
The most 'accessible' part of this molecular earthquake seems to be the last track, the hypnotic Forgive, which accesses a minimalist floral melody, leafless but with the ability to perfume the stunner you have just experienced.
If you want to avoid meteorites that seem to be travelling with the handbrake on, then don't listen to the apocalyptic Master: around this huge boulder in the sky, thunder and lightning hint at how dangerous it is...
Silent tidal waves are not absent, here portrayed by the crazy Grace The Teacher, who seems sly and asleep but, if you listen well to the arrows of that initial 'noise' (a vaporous mantra that numbs your awareness), you can't help but suffocate in the heavy waters of these notes.
It may not be a masterpiece but it sounds like it, hell it sounds like it, because let's not forget, witches do not miss their appointment with perfection...
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
5th June 2023