My Review:
Rita Tekeyan - Green Line
Columns of smoke, in the eyes of men already blind, because they are devoted to see what is not there, for convenience. It is usually men who invent wars and then ask others to make them concrete.
Splinters and tears remain that they will never see nor can they see: there are people who experience losses within their wounded dignity.
There are records that are born to bring on the table of the powerful with colored buttons the feedback of those secrets, deliberately armed with determination not to let them remain as such. And they are songs like hand grenades, loaded with blanks.
For their will is to make people understand and not to kill.
Rita Tekeyan has now come to her second album and has unfortunately not run out of stories to throw, along with hand grenades, before the blindness of the powerful, and also before us.
How she can create poetry, melody and rhythm with those wrinkles in her soul is an intense and beautiful mystery, yes, beautiful, because it reveals a force capable of illuminating. They are 12 nails that trace the boundary of a hidden Lebanon, though paths of tense and damaged lives.
The not famous Green Line, where atrocities pierced the sky of desperate existence: Rita brought light to those streets, to the stories of homes always lit by daily terrors.
She uses her voice like an antelope that still has energy to escape, that does not lose heart and has breath to be the messenger of hope, to finalize her desire for flowery streets.
But at the same time her singing has the desire to take those stories and erase their wrinkles.
The music is a procession of notes through clouds and the melody of a still-living dove, through piano scores and a necessary electronic music, deliberately kept on an evocative plane. These are minutes of magic within tragedy, revealing an energy that encircles our minds. The traumas, wounds and deaths in the album are those of human beings, but especially of women, who know the rays of the sun, and Rita, with her high-pitched singing, with the register of her voice that is sharp, imbued at times with crooning that shakes, makes us aware. We find ourselves with an artistic project that only in its lyrics, for those who are superficial and disinterested, could be indigestible: we should rack the brains of these people, through the lanes of selfish mental attitudes.
But I am convinced that the music can be received with less difficulty, given its propensity for interesting and certainly digestible melodic lines.
Rita's voice is white, in touch with the angels: soft yet robust, vibrant, trembling breaths.
Her singing is lyrical and vibrational, conscious and eclectic, portentous and magnetic. It surely makes harmony a dance with a powerful language that fixes our gaze among the rubble of a city brought to its knees.
Electroacoustic, crystalline ballads, syncopated rhythms, trajectories that bring dust which sticks to the mud make these songs a sampler of cues, insights, with ramifications like breaths of wind in the heart of a music that is also wounded, but that has the strength in itself not to be sad.
She does not deny herself dreams, moments of sweetness, but she wants to encircle the burden of pain in front of consciences with low, closed ears.
This musical journey offers us magnets to find atoms of melancholy, kilos of experimentation, miles of an East that was very close to our world. One can hear her deep work on the voice that is capable of moving, of making our emotion intimate. The inner gasps that come are able to activate the senses confining us in the space of a sacred silence, which we feel the need to respect. A passionate singing permeated with spectacular sharp lights, acting on the stage of a theater of confusion and reason. In her deep cuts of poetry connected to drama find place rows of insights and flashes of remarkable dynamism, for a purpose that while being challenging teaches and perfects us.
A heroine who on the front lines offers her soul to make us understand how the gift of life can be wasted by violence: for this reason alone she deserves our deepest Thanks.
Pack your bags: we leave for Beirut's Green Line, to visit the 12 nails and understand the wounds of others...
Song by song
Once we have presented our boarding pass, we are ready to fly to Beirut: B.L EXPRESS awaits us and we are immediately in Rita's intense expressiveness, with a musical movement that recalls the atmospheres of the Middle East, including European fragrances for a truly evocative whole.
With FORÊT NOIRE the roughness gives way to a more delicate tension, as the Lebanese singer thickens her gaze within the reality of a tormented area.
The poignant ROOFTOPS takes us into a particularly vivid dimension near an esotericism hinted at with her singing that recalls Lene Lovich.
The tragedy of that city turns out to be no longer questioned with ABRI, with its clear propensity for an ascetic-philosophical rancour that strikes us in full. A song that mutates, a hungry snake shooting venom inside our mouths.
NORA'S TREE, a furious daily dance that seems to act out its suffering on the theater of conspicuous cuts, is a blood clot basing on a piano only to find support from a lineup that pushes toward autumnal-flavored rock.
Drops of gunpowder in the drizzly DEVIL'S OB, the saddest of the twelve nails: the recitative vocals reveal contact with the devilish hemisphere which seems to turn into the smile that flies over our mediocrity. All the blackness of a city that cries out for help not to lose its mind.
DIAMANDA GALAS seems to begin YOUR SIN, a neo-Gothic ballad with an Arabian flavor, with a license to paralyze, because of its dominant theatricality and with killer strings leaning on Rita's voice which once again dominates.
With WEIGHT OF PAIN we come to an apparent gentle music, but after a few seconds a tear-starved violin allows the entry of heavy words sung with a residue of immense pain, an invoked return that proves to be the prayer of those who can achieve nothing more...
Like a timeless ritual the enthralling DK arrives, a necklace of silent visions that envelop the sounds making the song majestic, slowly picking up pace to become a dance among the rubble.
Y: calling Virgin Prunes to vision the situation, the artist creates a cantilena that seduces until her voice register, amid roaring discharges, goes in search of heaven, reaching it.
The lullaby that is about to make us close our eyes, amid sighs and sobs, is titled WHITE ANGEL and is a torrent of spirits held back with the string of courage, the voice seems to generate a gothic reverberation, with Rita's uvula painting the screams. The singing then becomes agitated towards the end to achieve perfection.
The album is concluded with the title song of her second album: GREEN LINE is the author’s farewell from a hospital bed. With its almost neofolk nature, the song sounds like a procession with a wounded face through increasingly silent streets. Declamatory and theatrical, elegant, it succeeds in consoling the inhospitable and corrupt world. Until the final guitar solo that breaks up any remnant of hope, to make way for the explosive, sharp voice, and it is precisely the latter that leaves us helpless among its streets.
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
29th May 2022
If you want buy the Cd you can contact directly the Artist
https://soundcloud.com/rita-tekeyan/sets/green-line?utm_source=mobi&utm_campaign=social_sharing
