Neon - Back In The Land Of Lost Horizons
The Holland that you would like, that you imagine exists in some way, shows itself with this resounding, energetic, glittering, dark album in a lovely way and to which you give a huge bow and thank you.
It cannot be otherwise if one really knows the cultural movement and also the musical movement of that country unjustly considered little by the masses who often reveal ignorance and incapacity. But the old scribe is here on purpose: let there be light, let it be direct, and let it be in focus!
Four main components for twelve songs that seem to turn inside the pages of history, with the skill of those who know how to squeeze for juice into which they can insert their components to create rigged poems recited in front of factories, through a Post-Punk soaked in well-dosed electronics, to land conviction on the track of a mysterious and restrained Coldwave. Everything is leaden, photographic, with the entrances of pain open, but what we must note is how each composition is a set of hands swollen with ideas, of scattering seeds in the musical territory for a harvest for which there is no need to wait, on the contrary, one immediately picks up their roar, touches their nerves and drinks some Scotch, while the notes of the Sax show an almost aggressive, if polite, sensuality.
One notices the sparks of London in the monumental Heartbeat (they will remind you of The Clash for sure, but the old scribe holds on to the Dutch band... ), you travel through the slow but splintered bullets of Liquid Cold, you visit The Chameleons with Promised Land, you walk through the industrial fog of Canta da Vito, you understand how alternative has mixed with the gothic sphere with the pelvic and neurotic Standing On The Other Side, daughter of the pounding bass of a gloomy London of the early 80s.
I could suggest you listen to Icemen with a copy of From The Lion Mouth in your hands, and I could try to describe all the tracks as if the songs were daughters of others. That would be wrong. What the scribe does is only to give co-ordinates, but then it takes careful listening, assessing the talent and discerning the continuous agility that allows them to vary, to be elusive and therefore unpredictable.
A jewel that starting from the blades of a windmill should reach inside you: when history is made by unknown people, everything becomes pride for those who have lived it...
