My Review: Black Swan Lane - the messenger

 

Black Swan Lane - the messenger

By Alex Dematteis

The return.

Courage, the need to establish a new presence, should be analysed with the utmost care when it comes from a network of metal cables with a silk core, like that of a messenger of time who knows no rest.

Two years after Dead Souls Collide, we find ourselves combining ecstasy and tension, joy with the duty to incorporate masses of research and reflection, without having to discard anything.

Contact, the need to clarify, the efforts to be made, any form of God to be considered, the messages of the mind to be established, the escapes, the anger, the sky in free fall, the ghosts, the crashes, the games of the heart, the panic, the hatred and the weapons.  This and much more enters the real and artistic world of a man who walks through time sowing petals of resistance and proactive approaches, immersing everything in his reservoir where dark colours are not pessimism, but rather a congenial way to preserve authenticity and honesty and develop solutions, using lyrics and music not as an outlet but rather an exploration aimed at clarifying the image in the mirror of his conscience.

Jack Richard Sobel's compositions have different effects on the heart and mind, and the generous Atlanta artist's twelfth album confirms this, with new solutions, experimentation, and an innate gift for not getting lost in frills, in the pursuit of success and other unhealthy forms of expression. He embodies his journey in a collection of songs and lets his unique voice and tracks take us into his hemisphere to silently celebrate this new contact.

Once again, this is an album with themes that are not easy to accept for those who are distracted by music and life. Jack reiterates his concepts, but he has learned to give new wings to his fingers, astonishing us with stylistic solutions and phenomenal ballistic choices such as falsetto singing. He has always favoured a melancholic touch, but, as with his last three albums, he manages to raise his voice, to shout, to shake things up. Kindness wins out, accompanied by a clear and robust moral code, with the beloved 80s and 90s protecting, albeit only partially, his love of songwriting. 

Always attentive to production, the songs, compared to his other works, seem more mature, reflective, almost like hypnosis that reaches others from the mind. There is nothing to celebrate in life except a healthy anger aimed at making the world a different place. So he creates symbolic characters and phrases that are not meant to win people over, but rather to illuminate the truth with wisdom.

The feeling one gets is that of a work that makes the human experience a wake-up call, using sounds, rhythm and melody as messages seeking attention that involves responsibility and not just well-being, distractions and entertainment.

The Messenger engages the soul, taking us into the deep sensitivity of a fragment dressed in music.

We find ourselves in the mood of a man who, through the alternative and rock duo, indulges in excursions into shoegaze as well as post-punk, taking care to reaffirm his own style, which has been recognisable since the beginning. There are expansions, insights and variations, especially in terms of song form, which finds a greater desire for exploration in this work.

As we are accustomed to hearing, it is the guitars that create compasses, reservoirs of emotion, illuminating the sound, turning noise into poetry and translating the thoughtful beats of the man from Atlanta, who once again improves his singing by interpreting each song in just the right way, creating the perfect combination of different expressive possibilities.

Beauty has always worn flames, screeches and melancholic nettles to seal songs, catharsis and emotional tensions, gathered with the intention of offering the listener respect for an artistic activity that is more difficult to practise and sustain nowadays. The dark side and the less heavy side finally find an armistice through a mass of melodies that seem to suggest the sun as their goal, while lava and tidal waves are ever-present at their core...

It is nothing more than a novel made up of notes, splendid hooks, tangles, leaps and dreams, never lacking the desire to confront reality.

Once again, Jack takes charge of all the instruments, clearly giving each of them a function that is both individual and collective, taking his bass playing skills to very high levels. The piano and keyboard are painters in great form, and the drums, his favourite artistic medium, seem to run through his entire career across twelve tracks. It is an eighteen-year seam that permeates time with constant value.

There are references to works such as A Moment of Happiness or The Last Time in Your Light, not as a lack of commitment or inspiration, but for a healthy use of certain structures that give the new compositions a solid framework. But never before, as in The Messenger, have we witnessed smoothing, new directions, branches, sudden changes of rhythm.

The voice is a package sent from his head to the world, a spark of dynamite that contemplates tenderness imbued with a healthy procession composed of the fluctuating vigour of melancholy, a faithful travelling companion, generating tears as a consequence, second after second. But it is a sensual, true, unfiltered friend: round, full, magical and infinite...

A work that decisively takes the path of American stratification, abandoning (perhaps unconsciously) the direct line with European alchemy. The result is a remarkable freshness, ideas that make everything fresh and intense, demonstrating that he has achieved independence with his indisputable ability to work on himself.

It is the images and the careful choice of words that constitute an enchanting torment, a pleasant stroll through the soul of a man who decides to confide, to reveal his concerns, to be an intimate star in the sea of daily violence. Certain passages are imposing, relevant, while others are, in fact, messengers of what tends to be hidden. His most authentic, attentive, profound album, meticulously crafted.

It is worth noting the significant reduction in loops, allowing the instruments greater freedom of movement, creating intense masses of aggregation, demonstrating a desire to work on dynamics, enabling the production to express different objectives. And so we find ourselves faced with a refined, delicate work, with important themes that are developed as if the musical notes were also arguments, allowing for a fruitful agglomeration.

It is rock, it is poetry, a self-certification of absolute autonomy, in which freedom is being able to work hard, in which everything makes a difference, in which the sum of the details improves the meaning and specifies it. In these tracks we have storms, rain, the human desert that highlights aridity, humble pleas for respect and dialogue, where war is expelled and where musical wisdom consists of the balance of the individual parts. Once again, Jack entrusts the primary aspect to the musical lexicon, as if his voice and words could rest. 

He addresses his listeners informally, surprising them with his openness to human contact and using new ways to make his music the garden of his home. His style remains recognisable, offering us a safe haven, but in this twelfth album he puts us on a velodrome and leads us into the waves of the sky. This explains the inevitable presence of Shoegaze, which allows the trails to penetrate more quickly. The dreamy aspect continues to surround his perimeter, but human maturation beautifully influences his abilities. And here is the new magic that makes listening a privilege, because never before has the need for welcome been felt as much as in this sad-winged fairy tale. Songs like invitations to dinner, like laughter waiting for the tension of the nerves to become, like an isolation that will come as a consequence because The Messenger is nothing more than a carpet of pearls, walking on which we can understand the skin of our soul...

Knowing how to transform frustration and concern into a commitment that brings common sense closer shows how much intensity has been used, how much meticulousness has gone into creating songs like planets, like stars, like horizons that change our gaze, to elevate artistic value to its maximum power and to make musical tracks a specific human space.

One cannot help but congratulate the choice of album cover, a spectacular snapshot by Jarek Kubicki, capable of combining painting and digital graphics, allowing the multidisciplinary artist to connect with Jack, suggesting, evoking, revealing the extraordinary imaginative power that sums up the concept of the album and at the same time allows the listener to approach it with curiosity, giving way to fascination for a sublime encounter between two arts.

Knowing how to transform frustration and concern into a commitment that brings common sense closer shows how much intensity has been used, how much meticulousness has gone into creating songs like planets, like stars, like horizons that change our gaze, to elevate artistic value to its maximum power and to make musical tracks a specific human space.

One cannot help but congratulate the choice of album cover, a spectacular snapshot by Jarek Kubicki, capable of combining painting and digital graphics, allowing the multidisciplinary artist to connect with Jack, suggesting, evoking, revealing the extraordinary imaginative power that sums up the concept of the album and at the same time allows the listener to approach it with curiosity, giving way to fascination for a sublime encounter between two arts.

Song by Song 

1  Promise

It all begins with guitars and bass in a continuous whirl, a rock punch with a hoarse voice, ready to scream. A God taken by the ears, a dialogue that leads to the absence of prayer, while the harsh and scorching sound immediately disorientates the listener, introducing them perfectly to the world of the man from Atlanta. 

2 Crash

Love often becomes a demand, attention, preceding the crash. Shoegaze masterfully combines with noisy melancholy, imbued with a poetic resignation that allows the music to describe the mood, the inclination. In this way, we find ourselves in a sky suspended between echoes of the nineties and the freshness of eternal pain...

3 Drawing In Your Heart

Jack's powerful, magnetic, delicate and poignant falsetto immediately amazes, reinforced in the chorus by a second voice. The musical structure consists of a sound progression that sticks to the soul, with the fear of loneliness allowing us to resist and stay together. A powerful song, even if its delicacy could mislead the interpretation. The novelty of the singing style is not the only surprise, as the lyrics and musical range are the perfect evolution of a celestial body that encompasses everything...

4 Shockwave

With a beginning that takes us back to the splendid Under My Fallen Sky from 2017, everything lights up with iron and lightning in the first verse, which then returns later on. The whole becomes consciousness that welcomes the sky in free fall, with Alternative lacerations, Dreampop petals and immature rock to keep the adrenaline level high. And, while a body suffers and the world trembles, Jack dusts off his old love for a style that allows him to mix harmonic and rhythmic planes in perpetual contact, in a seductive alternation...

5 When I Sleep

One of the most engaging and disturbing moments on this album, featuring exquisite guitars, meticulous drumming that complements the bitter lyrics, and a full, warm, scratchy voice, like a modern music box that suspends everything in a sonic and emotional embrace...

6 The Devil's Hand

Victories, calls, death, days gone by: a frenetic, appropriate rhythm leads us into the epicentre of rock, between the effervescent rhythm (able to stop and resume its course), sinuous arpeggios and the feeling of full gravity, in free fall, with the dark side dominating and absorbing earthly souls.

7 Laces 

And it is goodness, the call for constructive and positive change, that illuminates this track, allowing Black Swan Lane's musical journey to reveal itself fully in these sweet minutes. The semi-acoustic aspect serves as an introduction, entrusting the guitars and a synth with the task of dominating the scene. Then come the bass beats, followed by the drumming, which heightens the sensation of flying through the universe. But the amazement does not end there: first, a piercing electric guitar (followed by one of Jack's very rare solos) leads us to shed warm tears, introducing us to a new mode of expression for JRS, which allows him to intoxicate us once again. We find ourselves on the second side of this work aware that more surprises are coming...

8 Waves Whisper Stay

Nature, which leads to the pairing with humankind, finds its setting in this dreamy expression, in which Jack's syncopated rhythm and short singing allow us to reach the catchy but never overly pop chorus, as it is not in the nature of this fertile and powerful artist to wink at banality. A scent of nostalgia runs through the music, while the lyrics show the absence of pain, as if apathy were an effective weapon, while the waves, both musical and marine, create perfect whirlpools that give us the sensation of a mnemonic and sensory flight...

9 The Messenger 

Powerful, bitter, energetic, reflective: the track that gives the album its title offers yet another different side to the songwriting, with its pauses, its scratchy sound, and the wonderful alternation of guitar movements. The voice shows its natural propensity for enchantment, while the clipped wings of the messenger angel reveal the centrality of the concept album. Simply perfect in its cathartic ability to make us feel and see the movements of the soul... 

10 Look At Me The Same

The planet of needs and clarity of intent seduce and encompass the natural propensity to create dreamy, rhythmic music, between shoegaze guitars and refined rock, with semi-acoustic guitar arpeggios and piano looking at each other, drawing us into a tender dance...

11 Flower Girl

Time, the moon, panic, a black vortex skilfully suspended here, with drumming that takes us back to ancient memories of the band, complete the musical mapping, offering us black and yellow rays, manifesting the need for love, which leads a couple to the possibility of a lunar landing...

12 Empty Desks

To conclude, Jack presents us with the apotheosis, the bitter sense of a cruel existence that seeks war and generates victims, despair and pain. To do so, he suspends the atmosphere, creates slow whirlwinds, uses the instruments sparingly to make everything seem like a caress in the conscience of the powerful who badly decide the fate of many souls. Then comes a vortex of elegant shoegaze atoms on which his voice rests, fuelling a delicate procession of enchanting tears swaying in the sky. The ending, as always for the American author, must be evocative and leave a memory, as well as the desire to listen again. And once again, he has hit the mark...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

1-12-2025

Black Swan Lane - Jack Richard Sobel / Music, Lyrics and all Instruments

Executive Producer / Frédéric Detrézien

Assistant Producer/

Steve Clare

Marco Oldenbuettel

J. Kevin Jewel

Alex Dematteis

David J. Griffith

Out on December 12 2025

My Review: The Black Veils - Gaslight

“Sometimes, in the morning, with the sun shining, it's hard to believe that night has passed.”

From Gaslight, a film by George Cukor

Territories often seem like a slingshot waiting to be fired, a discreet and slow volcano seeking eternal possession. In this, cinema has provided nourishment, wings, chains, pins and much more, ultimately creating an umbilical cord with music. On this occasion, for the title of the Bologna band's fourth album, it is the film itself that stimulates and protects these ten majestic compositions.

However, we also find ourselves in Frankfurt's Ratinger Hof disco, surrounded by dancing souls, crucified by paranoia, like robotised and stale existences, in the middle of the 1980s, to breathe life into a funeral and its party. Because in this work, death becomes a blessing of unconsidered fortunes, a mandatory, gentle and certainly accommodating pass.

A work that demonstrates methodical organisation and, while maintaining the acidity of post-punk trajectories, in this episode the alteration, perfect and sublime, is offered by an electronic nature in its many forms and obstinacy, a dark electro that blends with fascinating synthwave sparks and clusters of semantic waves typical of the most veiled shoegaze.

An album like a mystical and painful tide, with primitive purities in gentle processions, bringing transistors and amplifiers back to the stage of the most ancient acting. Ringing timbres, mantras and loops that smell each other, lyrics like coal about to turn into sacred ashes.

It is not sight but hearing that is subjugated by these textures, long trained blades, but rather the imagination, which here is expanded and transported like a dancing swing, back and forth in time.

Like warbling birds, songs expatriate the now bored sense of spiritual consensus, creating sudden debates within our consciousness.

Dance becomes a pagan ritual authorised by today's rudeness, by ancient stories synthesised here and thrown into watts and vocal cords, like an orderly data transmission.

We often find ourselves remembering the Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW) and encountering the pleasure of sarcasm, that blissfully macabre, cruel but sincere sarcasm.

The range of colours, sounds, associations and programming are part of a profound maturity shown by these three musicians who know how to explode, explore, throw the mud of mediocrity and turn it into continuous mental percussion.

Openings and closings in relation to their ten-year past show eclecticism, clarity of theatrical visions, and stances designed to consciously stun any certainty. And this is where their masterpiece fully manifests itself.

Music that makes the mind race, that elevates it and sinks it without remorse. They take risks, gamble and don't care, like soldiers loyal only to artistic obedience that recognises no other powers.

All this is nothing more than a black and white rainbow from which nails and confetti rain down, connecting a set of mental electrical cables in constant descent.

The themes of Gregor Samsa's lyrics seem to support the sonic weeds, hammering home the transition between night and day, between dreams and daily nightmares, making Mario d'Anelli and his guitars and synths the muse for Filippo Scalzo's wild and ruthless bass.

Listening to this album is like a marathon in which you break down, lose fluids and drain yourself of all banality.

Severe, ruthless, with notable references to those fertile years that the three did not hesitate to explore, adding their own sweet and dark pessimism.

As if Poe became a musical trinity, without opponents...

Fear as a resource, pain as an opportunity to change the guise of thoughts, in an energetic exchange of fluids, to make the dances passionate and bring souls to a refuge that knows no lock...

Yes, everything enters and everything leaves this maritime, celestial place, a sublime condensation of nebulous enrichments, clearly in excellent shape to learn about our submission.

Songs like Rhodolia rosea, so as not to feel the fatigue of thoughts, to give the mood a ventriloquist's illusion.

Ancient iconicity, oscillatory movements and an empathetic propensity to use synths like glass brushes, often filling them with fascinating harmonic movements, are highlighted, yet the whole becomes illusory and therefore sublime.

The notes make the air a parking lot muffled by warlike, almost obscene noises, exuberant certainly, but above all, exquisite crystalline forms, capable of filling words, emptying them, repeating the exercise with notes, and everything seems to go too fast, giving the new listener the chance to experience infinite repetitions.

The certainty that these ten tracks are a beacon of the future immersed in the sea of music that was, as if the gaze of the lioness mother became a carpet on which to run the future, becomes obscene and astonishing...

A work unsuitable for the majority of empty souls: for them, the invitation is to move on.

For the others: a long orgasmic plot awaits the liturgy of deepening.

The many changes in trajectory, rhythm and grafting in each individual track perfectly express the meticulous study of these musicians, artists who, through this work, demonstrate that there is no origin but rather a residence.

Which is above all mental.

Lunar, nocturnal images, in which disturbing rays of sunlight are shown as clues, evidence, summaries, but never as hypotheses, making perfection human and achievable.

When post-punk DNA opens its arms to electronica, we see EBM pills embedded in the liquids of sinuous dark electro, filling the banks and emptying doubts.

The singing often seeks reflection, crash, metrical form and decadent poetry, moving from poetic textures to a high register redolent of screams and vomit, creating an undeniable and immense benefit for our listening.

Painful, pregnant with claws, a scout of the soul, this vocal approach seems to bring the cabaret of the Virgin Prunes to the Po Valley, like a eager electroshock.

The duo that takes on the responsibility of being a glass slingshot breathes in the balmy German currents, like those of Killing Joke, exhaling brutality and impetus, like moral obedience to darkness, brought to light here with these vertical zigzags, without ever giving the impression that fatigue can cage them.

The Old Scribe is impressed by this pressing form of lament, never expressed, never in the form of direct invective in the lyrics but conveyed by the soundscapes. The words are black seeds, ploughs, poles, black velvet slaps: the pain only comes at the end...

In conclusion: this black and white rainbow does not need our eyes, it only needs the bad mood of our hypocritical existence to bury us with its angelic black beauty...

Song by Song

1 - Nyctalopia

The ferocity of Abwärts, a sadly little-known German band, enters the bass that assaults the ears, with the guitar becoming an echo of the heart and the voice a gesture in which genocide is surrounded by the terrifying and pulsating flashes of consciousness. Laden with post-punk torment, the piece makes rhythm and obsession compatible...

2 - Comedy of Menace

We move to the Markthalle in Hamburg: the rhythm and neurotic poetry of the bass pass through the tackles of an abrasive guitar and the vocals become the sponge of enormous eyes that know how to lie perfectly. The guitar solo does credit to Bill Duffy and the circle with the 1980s breaks perfectly.

3 - Gaslight

Coldwave movements invade the ballroom, cinema inhabits the pupils and the salvation of the soul passes through sin. The music presents itself as a Bristol immersed in fog, between EBM paintings and hallucinatory spaces of dark electro in search of loops and chains...

4 - Buster Keaton

We fall: into the lyrics, into the rhythm, into the explosive elegance of nervous frames, of paranoia in a row, and the flashes of Cabaret Voltaire return to inhabit the band's planet, with the chorus making us understand the importance of the Psychedelic Furs. But everything is electric, eclectic, a visual poem that runs breathlessly...

5 - The Spectral Link

Not a filler track, nor a bridge, but rather the harmonious combination of three souls experiencing the roar of the sky, bringing Alan Parson and Kraftwerk into contact, but not in the last century...

The future can only be a disaster, and this track represents it in advance, with lashes, through a synth that takes on the role of narrating it, shamelessly, making fear visible (at the beginning), then creating whirlpools and colours that turn from pink to black. The voice is silent, for an apparent silence, because everything becomes noise...

6 - Black Kittens Against Privilege

The emotion, frenzy and enthusiasm of death find the perfect outfit, the right story, the ghost that reveals itself laughing among the grooves, looking at the world in black and white. And so does the music: a funeral march that recounts our modest form of free will. Sounds and vocal cords become an equation and guitars mix with synths to line the doubt. Disconcerting beauty to surrender to...

7 - Tightrope Walker

The human void, of existence, is recounted here, like an X-ray, like a blood test whose results we will certainly not accept. Violent, dark, psychedelic in mood, the song is a generous lash to the heart, as the brain has already shown its demise... Bringing the Bat Cave back to life with a single blowtorch is truly a miracle, a dark one...

8 - Piggies

D.A.F. rent a dream: to come back to life for a few minutes, and they do so in this delirium, accepting guitars full of shoegaze liquids and blessing the scratches of a vocal metric that blends with the voluptuous thrust of incredible, divining, breathless steps...

9 - Have You Seen Bunny Lake?

We mourn rotten hearts, visit mocking laughter and dance like robots without the weight of the soul, in the EBM vortex that seeks marriage with ascending guitar textures...

10 - Seed of Revolt

Louis Wain, a cat, a black dress, and the elegant closing track probably show us the sonic resistance of the Bolognese trio: the melodic research is reserved for the last track, with doubled voices, Stop and go and harmonic layers with double-breasted, to come out towards a funeral party that makes us all happily depressed...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

14th November 2025

Gregor Samsa - Vocals

Filippo Scalzo - Bass

Mario d'Anelli - Guitars, Synth

Icy Cold Records

Metaversus

https://open.spotify.com/album/2yHLnynl3gYRrYn8gVuQNz?si=zY2YFc2CTWivf6FdAlSZvQ

https://theblackveils.bandcamp.com/album/gaslight-2