Long Gone - Drowned
"Love lasts as long as memory endures, no matter if it is sweet or bitter, if it is punctuated with deeds that have happened or only imagined." Manuela Stefani
Water: the Goddess, the Magnificent, the Violent, the Precious, the Infinite, the Rebellious that plays with Calm, the Resource that should be priceless, the Purifier that washes and soils, the Selfish that becomes Generosity. The specific list of what that is could last for the length of a novel, it is not the case, the old scribe knows that. But, believe me, in the minutes of listening to this album you will feel her surrounding you, bathing you, making you float in a sea of emotions that will amaze you and launch you into a generous plunge halfway between the clear and the mysterious chiaroscuro. Songs like diviners, like poets of the desire to make memory the first accomplice of water, which can drown everything, one must be very careful.
The creators are four navigators of the sublime motions of a city devoid of the sea, but which has tons of that chemical compound flowing through it with its canals (Navigli), and that is Milan, covered with these souls, with their fluid, dense, sticky, moonlike drops full of salt and flour.
They come to the appointment of their debut work with a well-articulated artistic concept, developed in such a way that these compositions become the blankets of waves rising into the air with power and elegance. One is surprised, amazed, stupefied by these architectures that embellish thoughts, where the initial intention was to make an imaginary journey of almost drowning. But the record gives life, strength, courage, and with its compositions one becomes a navigator on the rivers of memory, the real protagonist of the album. Using patterns very close to Post-Rock, with guitars, bass and drums careful not to remain confined to that one stylistic possibility, here we see them rowing with an almost sombre Alternative, songwriting for certain moments, with Indie Rock keeping the situation under control and putting a little of its own into it. But there's really no point in mentioning any bands that might remind us of something or someone: the scribe invites an experience free of the boorish need for comparison. There is so much of the boys' own water that it would seem an insult to aprioristically direct one's listening with a list, totally unnecessary.
When a set of liquid beams (twelve on this LP) arouse curiosity, addiction, fascination, then one becomes an accomplice to a sound poem etched on the skin, which turns into memory and sustenance. The Milanese band has generated a shake-up, probably in their intentions, but I think also with a certain amount of doubt as to whether they have succeeded or not, in their musical panorama, demonstrating class, the immense capacity to be Italian in the world, with certain characteristics of the country of the boot perfectly mixed with those of other nations and continents, resulting in a record socially capable of speaking a single language that is valid in all places. And it is that of beauty embraced with meaning and depth, to make everything a port within ports of our thoughts.
Everything breathes of continuous discoveries, of evaluations in the making that take up residence among the notes as they come out of the amplifiers, with sounds, songs and a very high production to make this musical exercise a melancholic act of joy to be repeated in the photographic listening of the necessity it proposes not to abandon it. Time, in this artistic debut, is a wound that is closely watched and the four of them make us feel it in our beats imbued with astonishment and necessity, because in the end this debut record becomes a sudden, lightning-fast, visceral marriage. And now the old scribe takes you to each of these twelve liquid bundles, the new home of this unimaginable idyll, but one that was born with the Drowned experience...
Song by Song
1 Losing One
The entrance, the opening, the guys' approach to begin this adventure is psychedelic in the opening bars, with the guitar helping to break out of that minimal setting to move everything towards a tepid, enveloping slow-core, through a rhythmic carpet that keeps the atmosphere perfectly blended.
2 Throw Stones
We immediately dive into what will be the guiding line of the work: contact with time, in a cloud of notes like unhurried rain, which circulates in the sky with elegance and sadness at its side, amid masterfully restrained guitar rumbles, with the voice that seems to try to reach into the contemporary, arousing remarkable suggestions. And then it's brilliants of heartbreaking notes towards the end of the track...
3 Last Thing I Want
The album moves decisively into its intimate dimension, but ready to open itself up with a refrain that seems to come out of a 1960s London cellar. Between slow but full of pathos suggestions, the chords follow each other to become an embrace. The melody, so explanatory for the band from Milan, here shows its face perfectly.
4 Lost In Confusion
And it is Post-Rock at the highest level, mixed with Slow-Core, to generate applause from the heart: the talent is undeniable, the song is a mental palace, everything perfectly constructed to induce the listener to dream, but also to a sense of loss of the senses, which turns out to be pleasant despite the fact that one can feel the pain between the notes and the words. The waves of the guitar seem to stretch the nerves and it is enchantment, a poignant display of class.
5 No Better
Everything grows, and grows, with this Post-Rock / Alternative swim, we are in the waves of the sky: we cry, the heart feels the danger of reality, everything seems to be a projection of human complexity and in the refrain we are convinced that Long Gone are the painters of credibility, through a poignant melody, then comes the guitar solo to take us around to adult thoughts.
6 Slow Decay
Not giving an inch, on the contrary, the four have decided to nail us down in front of the quality of slowness, the mother of all intelligence. And there, once again, the charm of a decadence is released that is acceptable, not suffocating, and brings us a melancholy that sounds like something out of a 1920s silent film. The voice, at one point, sings over the drum rolls, creating spectacular tension and then
the track
opens up towards the slightest distortion of the guitars, generating a perfect harmony.
7 How Long
Time for the old scribe to be completely moved, as everything becomes haunting but elegant, the sensual guitar playing takes us back to the US of the 90s, and the feeling of diving into the void is precise, thanks to a perfect evolution of the melody.
8 Read Loud This Letter
It seems as if Catherine Wheel lived in Milan, then they say goodbye and leave the Milanese band to its talents, the feeling becomes sombre, with a delay that enchants, and the result is an astonishing demonstration of how the sound here is mature at the highest level, all framed towards the magnificence of a palpable tension, which is dissolved by the clusters of notes from the guitar that towards the finale knows how to bewitch us, without fear. And then away, towards the last minute, with tears welling up.
9 Reap Me Back
A guitar arpeggio shows up at the beginning of the track and loops like an installation you can no longer give up. Art finds its sublimation within the dust of this song, a meek lament, a cradling of memory to kill an unconscious part of oneself. Mysterious, delicate, hypnotic: we are at stratospheric levels of a tension that has a splendid gag in its mouth...
10 Getting Cold
Towards the end of the album we are confronted with an episode that reveals, if it had not yet been realised, the zone where the band lives: that of a buffer state between the madness of beauty and the normality of fear, in a game of footholds in which everything seems to be collapsing towards a listening addiction. It is impossible to turn your back on these guys, you just have to listen to the intensity, nervous and magnetic, that comes out of their propensity to make music an act of faith towards storytelling...
11 Blind Mind
The penultimate track is a parade of notes, on a catwalk that, starting with the Velvet Underground, passing through Athens, Georgia, where the old R.E.M. thank you, arrives in Oxford, the time for a salute to Radiohead, and then away, back to Milan, to show the world that this record is a magic that must find a place in your hearts, on your shelves and in your rainy days, where the latter are emotions...
12 Blues Procession
And it is a magnet that closes the path of beauty, to define and specify completely what we have experienced: Blues Procession is the summary, the fist that opens and caresses and invites you to stand within its boundaries, between the voice that finds yet another perfect vocal melody and the din of guitars that greet, with the bass and drums that once again, almost silently, have allowed perfection to perform...
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
2nd March 2023
The album will be published on 3rd March 2023
