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giovedì 27 marzo 2025

My Review: Loom - a new kind of SADNESS

a-new-kind-of-sadness

My Review: David Middle - A Goth, A Piano & Songs of Sorrow

David Middle - A Goth, A Piano & Songs of Sorrow

A moody shadow rises from the skies of Cambridge (he has been doing this for so many years), constantly expanding, using different artistic forms, taking courage, work, talent and misfortune under the wing of his splendid and stubborn need not to leave the world without his obsessions, sweetness, integrity, will to make his own cloak the gaze of his purity.

This expression of nature has a name: David Middle, a gothic, cinematic privateer, at times a mime of life, at other times a cabaret performer who defies blackness by transforming himself like the most voracious of colours. To move forward, to stop time, to build coral reefs with his straightforward philosophy, his vocal chords acute, angular, wisely tremendous and implacable, boiling, a powder keg plundering calm and leading it towards an act of agnostic faith.

A solo album, while his soul has never failed to collaborate with bands and parallel projects, is a choice that makes his conscious flow more specific, in a way that allows an unquestionably strong and circumstantial focus to his lyrics that are so powerful and capable of transforming reality, fears, silence and memory like the pilots of a mental palace that he displays flawlessly.

He uses note strategies in an unusual way, colouring the sonic textures with the wind of continuous inspiration, ranging from Klaus Nomi, to the Virgin Prunes, to Rozz Williams, to the darkest Alice Cooper, touching on Genesis P-Orridge's shoulder and Marc Almond's chin. But it is only the beginning, a false trail, as David has prairies of his own, like the seeds of his so autonomous and original thinking.

Life and its pains are not recounted but rather experienced at the same time, as if everything was going on as we listen, and this sensation, divine and massive, leaves black petals on our breath, making us aware of an addiction that we had not hoped to witness...

We can, in this way, reflect on how the paucity of the instruments used actually open the doors of perception, giving our minds the space to expand the need to fluidify this pentagram that instead of being poor is full of great suggestions. Black and white keys and a theatrical sequence of movements that accommodate synthetic strings and handclapping that suggest silence around them: Middle is a magician out of this time, free of conditioning, so baroque in his fertility that he does not accept forcing from the expressive forms of the present.

He builds sentences that, voraciously, dance in his uvula scratching the celestial vault, the only true paradise that sees his workshop be a cascade of thoughts padded with enchanting plays of light, where dusky is only the start of his artistic, powerful and olfactory, sensorial needs as the orchestra of his beats ends up invading everything, calmly and with a desperate intelligence.

An album for souls adept at being enveloped, involved, to suspend the part that refuses to understand the intensity, the duty of conscience, becoming a distributor of rational sparks that embrace the purity of feelings that have fallen into unwanted solitude. The combination of music and words thus turns out to be a perfect mantra with which to fall into the pleasantness of pain.

The harmonic research shows integrity, knowledge of expressive methods and a great respect for that part of musical history that today's music does not know or respect. David thus reveals himself to be a fighter with notes like gentle bullets, while the words are sabre-rattling blanks, capable of hitting the space that lies perfectly between the mind and the heart.

The artist turns his attention towards nature, measuring distances and similarities, engaging the road of description by harmonising his own complicit spirit, maturing with music an intense, almost mute bond, in order to freely experience a connection with entities that are surely more good.

One always gets the impression of a maturity that induces David to cradle the wrinkles of his own mind, pushing him towards an almost secret form in which to be a guardian and diviner, in search of truths, albeit uncomfortable, but handled with authority.

When one gets the impression that he wants to sow neo-folk petals, one senses a perhaps anachronistic pagan sacredness, which nonetheless offers the measure of his cultural extension, and his language can be a sweet poison that turns bitter when overturned: miracles like fixtures in the dark...

It then happens to hear him take leave of life (in the majestic Ode to Jacqueline) one feels shivers, as if a friend is leaving, and it is one of the most touching moments to come to terms with. The skilful willingness to give melodies that stick in the mind means that the words do the same, ending up stretching the inches of our listening.

The orchestrations, minimalist and never pompous, also give the measure of an accurate production, capable of giving us the impression of a tale in music that must be reread and reread again: not a syllable of beauty is lost in this work that deserves the best reception...

Song by Song

1 - No One Hears Me

‘Pull me out from the drowning mud’

A dance appears, in the night, to be a tale between anxiety and missed dreams. The music is a balmy gesture across pounding keys with a soft leaning towards the low register...

2 - Climbing Stairs

‘Every fall is a lesson, every climb is a spell’.

The contrast between the heavy, slow notes of the piano and David's singing create a nocturnal flash into which to fall with dignity. A song that seems to come from the theatrical and cabaret tension of the best Marc Almond. And it is apotheosis in repetition...

3 - Help Me Please

‘I, see faces, but memories still fade’.

Memory finds resounding centrality here, and the bass ride and piano counterpoint tear us to shreds. And then that invocation, which turns into a mantra to be kept in the secret circuit of our guilt. A timeless masterpiece...

4 - The Whispering Wings

‘Underneath the whispering trees

French theatre takes the stage, changes its dress and becomes an English echo of the eighteenth century, with a wingspan of the refrain that seems to be a warning, in which terror grabs dreams and kills them...

5 - Final Witness

‘Scared to last you

never rest’

There's dancing, and without the drumming it's even better: on your toes, like classical dancers, while the lyrics pan around supported by a voice that becomes a weeping needle...

6 - Ode to Jacqueline

‘My time has come, and now i know I said goodbye’.

The rhythm slows down and the keys sentenced, then open their arms inside a circle of loving lights full of tension, invitations, until the finale with a farewell that perfectly translates a score so willing to be grateful to classical music, which here becomes even more evident and necessary

7 - Gothic Candles (Midnight Mix)

‘Through the darkness, we journey hand in hand’

David takes us steadily into the night, into the darkness, to traverse the illusions of dreams and the more obvious and real forms of pain, with a gothic musical setting, as if Rozz Williams were urging him not to lose the perfect theatricality of his singing...

8 - Walking with the Dead

‘In my heart, the dead will stay’

A feat, a new thunder in the heart and head, for this overture that becomes a pleasant torture, trying to turn a free flight into a dutiful crash. Everything here smells of finality, as if living with death could really be the only joy.

9 - Our Broken World

‘Our innocence lost in the hands of fools’.

The opening vocal takes us back to Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, but then everything shifts and we enter into a sunny drama, a playfully reasonable contrast, and the music makes the whole thing perfectly cohesive and intact...

10 - A Hollow Heart

‘But through the tears, I'll find my way’.

Despair is necessarily a slow process. Instead, David makes it almost an upbeat, fast, light-voiced phase, and music that seems to tickle the winter...

11 - Dark Love

The most refined, most tense and dramatic track comes almost at the end of the album, leaving dandy petals in the lyrics and musical cues that cross eras and styles only to make us feel the bitter taste of a love full of darkness...

‘A symphony of lust, makes your heartbeat tight’

12 - Mood Swings

‘I laugh until I cry’

A filtered voice, as never before, leads the way to the last song, which is like a hidden epitaph, buried by angelic music with shades, emblematically, dramatic. And it is a soft breath that extinguishes the candle, which we immediately relight to listen again to this album so delightful and meaningful that it is a great pity to overlook...

Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
27th March 2025

https://batcaveproductions.bandcamp.com/album/a-goth-a-piano-songs-of-sorrow

venerdì 21 marzo 2025

My Review: The Bolshoi Brothers - The Bolshoi Brothers

The Bolshoi Brothers - The Bolshoi Brothers

Once upon a time, and still is, there was a place in Wiltshire, in the south of England, not far from Bath, a place made famous by a post-punk, darkwave band (Bolshoi), whose name is Trowbridge and which for a while carried the quartet's delicious vicissitudes in its belly.

In 1990 the band disbanded and now the Old Scribe is about to take you on an ocean voyage, slow, to the heavens, with a harmonic blend that has ancient, delicate, fragrant overtones, where folk, psychedelia, the dampened skin of Alternative and Indie Rock form the basis for an inevitable rational circle. The eleven songs were written during lockdown, at a distance: Florida calls, Seattle answers, in an only pretendedly separate path. The ideas, pregnant with moods and matured exposures to the thickening of thoughts at arm's length with philosophy, are set free by talent, by working on meaning, on the back of stories from the protected envelope of sounds that shed tenderness and curiosity. Many are the places over which the songs glide, many the references in which one might find a smile, a relief, but, above all, great is the perimeter of the verses, the arrangements, the singing, the energetic flow, the rays of sunshine that make the Bolshoi of yesteryear a pleasant but not essential memory.

Trevor Tanner, as always guitarist and vocalist, draws, attracts the listener into his mental prairies, while Paul Clark (keyboards) is the great creator of this kaleidoscope, of this forest that tries to capture the light to feed on hope. And their new residences, American, have favoured an artistic birth in which, between the two poles, sensations, pains, impetuses and a thick sensory vegetation are compressed: an album like a momentum that knows no direction, to give meaning to true freedom.

It is rock that seems to be born from the burrs of Lou Reed, from the Australian psychedelia of the second half of Church's career, and even calls to mind the 1990s period of British bands that reproduced the thrill of the American shore that was specifically inspired by that of Boston. And that of the British band Eat. Moreover, there is the thrill given by the works of bands close to slowcore, especially then when a melancholic sense prevails in the refrains.

The old sombre petals are not absent, the broadsides of toxins, but the whole is more polished, with the ability to enter even country areas, almost like a challenge, easily won, as the two have never missed the appointment with irony (as in the song Cowboy Chords). However, throughout this artistic exercise, the guitars are always far from swallowing the whole: they are generous, attentive and scrupulous, willing to translate the passage of their lives.

It takes courage to write a flutter of wings, when previously they were describing insecure footsteps in the dark night on the streets of London.

The testimony of adulthood, of a path that seeks development, cannot be tied to nostalgia.

There are elements of contact with a glorious and dangerous idea: to orchestrate existence with songs like a Matryoshka doll with the intention of contact, as if the songs were pages inside a library eager to fit into the palms of our hands.

When Beautiful Creature arrives, it becomes clear how the American rock roots are capable of revealing the post-punk side of yesteryear, but clothed in a luminous film close to the enchantment of a miracle, which is perfectly successful. The presence of the nineties is strong in at least half of the tracks, however not as a limitation, but as a muscular gymnasium of solos capable of bringing the sound back to its rightful place. And then the Blue Aeroplanes often peep in, as does the feel of a pop cabaret in search of shy applause, and Trevor's acting takes the stage of madness, with quotations, references that are truly remarkable. One dances with awareness, smiles and finds generous tears in the splendid and conclusive This Town, a true intuitive jewel, capable of surprising and dragging into the intimate locality of reasoning every fear...

Fulcrum, barycentre and arrow free to separate from the dungeon is the mammoth Platitudes of Scorn, a biological treatise, a vocabulary of beauty that, starting from English psychedelia, lands in the claustrophobic American ballad, to become the piece on which to connect the sunny and the sombre sides of the two musical craftsmen, here in total harmony, to give not only the song but the entire album an inescapable sense of epicness.

They have grasped the sense of the passing of time and let it turn its back on them, without bitterness, without unnecessary eruptions of anger. A resounding discipline, made possible by their own production, makes the whole thing feel like one long breath from eleven feathers, each one heartening the others.

Small sparks from their past can be found in the penultimate composition, Built in Obsolescence, a crossroads, a pill that from the mind of a past tries to reach reality. Amniotic, neurotic, electric, it is definitely epidermic in that it knows how to hold an enormous amount of time by compressing it into a minute-length that, although short, is very representative of the period that was glorious for them. One cannot do without Suburbs, that second sonic enchantment that sends shivers down one's spine, for the writing that burns away hostilities and restores meaning to provincial living, to stories that risk remaining unheard.

One can do without a passport but not without identity: here, the aforementioned This Town reveals remixed old loves (The Velvet Underground), which in a moment of freshness manage to fool the movement of the hands of the clock, only to move on to the Beatles and England, for a homecoming.

Which is perfectly the dominant factor of this record: starting from the limit (the lockdown), to find a new residence: the one within oneself, for a resoundingly harmonious and intense result...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

21st March 2025

https://thebolshoibrothers.bandcamp.com/album/the-bolshoi-brothers

mercoledì 19 marzo 2025

My review: HA : ZE - Healers

HA : ZE - Healers

We start by boarding a friend, the imagination, and putting it at the centre of a chat, intense, along with the story, and then turn the whole thing around in the capital of Latvia, Riga, entering the rooms, mental first and physical later, of a musician and producer, almost unconscious son of that city that trafficked with life in a really difficult way during the Second World War, with thousands of Jews condemned to an unjust death.

In this second album under the name HA : ZE, Tomass Bekeris continues the journey begun in 2018 through his debut with that Passage that had so impressed the Old Scribe.

However, it is good to know that the artist in question has a long history in the field of heavy metal and then matured, like a sudden big bang, into a multiple and surprising dilation.

Here, in these mammoth nine tracks, we find ourselves in the watery vapour of moods in search of a moment's respite, with the urge to enter musical genres that are only used to brushing up against each other. This is how electronica, hip hop, post punk, post rock, ambient present themselves, with an often midi guitar contouring the sky of this tidal wave, incredibly slow, but dense, like a storm that plays at approaching almost by stealth. The space of the research is concentrated in the assimilation of distances, of the routes planned by places and people, to totally exclude the voice, as a spiritual act necessary not to stain these sound projections.

Tomass, in order to get to the core of a stuttering reality, slows down the apotheosis of rhythms, so diseductive, to inject into it sound textures that come to settle, seduce, gut the superfluous and recharge the soul with a new light.

It is definitely in that side of the world where hypnosis comes from impervious places, from the harshness of living against an unbending nature. And it is in that room, where nothing is minuscule, that the notes of this compositional ace find perfect symbiosis with the landscapes not far from his city: everything is conversion, contact, motion at a continuous place. The loops, the dynamics do nothing more than bring the intuition of the plot into a compulsory opening, with scorching arrangements but kept at bay with class and wisdom.

The variety, which includes sweetness and electric juices at the limit of endurance (for those who do not like even slightly heavy guitars), is at the service of a prodigious rigour: what wins is not rhythm, harmony and more (the task above all of the song form and Pop music), but rather the listening prior to those single moments here compressed, grouped and then disseminated in multiple variations, to make listening a dreamlike journey but within a careful cerebral activity. Electronics is never the skin, let alone the bones of this musical architecture, but the glue that, from low to high temperature, manages to keep connected situations that fill the sky of confusion the perfect place to feel the drama of these compositions.

And it is chaos. Industrial petals that scour. Disturbing unease. Melting terror. Splashes of light and advancing darkness.

The bass is the instrument that makes listening inhospitable to the faint-hearted as it rummages the underbelly, while the synthesisers summarise, with the guitars painting the sides of pain.

The horizon becomes the season of courage: whoever listens to Healer puts himself in the safe haven of these nervous pills in search of sweetness, as the inevitable soundtrack to inner breakdowns. Tomass Bekeris does not forget the metal effervescence of his past, but transfers it, smoothing out the harshness and impetus, to bring it all into an almost invisible progressive layer, to befriend the angels of the notes, who here, in this hypnotic contraption, often find moments of calm and serenity. But we are witnessing some splendid unforeseen, miraculous bitter perversions, which do extraordinary damage to the security that listening could create. This explains the thousands of tiny, sensual inserts that seduce and hybridise notes that seem to be the ‘main’ ones.

To achieve all this, the Latvian musician calls upon eight artists, each of them to render a wedge, a stone, a nerve that weighs itself down only to try to vibrate in the vulnerable space of the imagination. Not guests, but additional architects that thicken the initial project. We find ourselves, then, in front of minimal and then objective broadsides, with transistors sticking to the sound, the true king of this incredible project: not in his image, let alone likeness, but a fugitive, a cross-country athlete fleeing from those lands to find other dimensions.

A primitive impulse governs the appearance and the electronic set-up: keyboards and effects ranging in seconds, while seeking the redundancy of delay to generate dust and amniotic liquids, with the result of witnessing a birth that is nine tracks long, not nine months

Bitterness, indiscipline, honesty and its opposite shine unhappily in these guitars that sum up what early dream pop did. But it could not remain pure. The secret of the beauty and, above all, of the richness of this sonic effluvium is precisely to be found in the willingness to shuffle the cards, the musical decades, to specify the need for even forced but sensible embraces, to make the whole become a prefabricated structure whose interior one can inhabit with less fear...

One cannot but turn out to be travellers, perplexed and unsatisfied perhaps for many, but at least the Old Scribe is absolutely convinced that what has been explored is a geographical, historical mystery, full of dust, of diadems, of strategies, of naivety in search of adoption, to end up, exhausted, in an infinite cuddle, full of bruises...

Album of the year 2025

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

19th March 2025

https://haze.bandcamp.com/album/healer