My Review: Grant Swarbrooke - And the World Spins on (Home Recordings) Ep /Sleepers Ep / Liminal Fall (single)

 

Grant Swarbrooke, a vocal artist from southern England, has emerged as a sublime figure amidst the nation’s gradual slowdown due to political, social, and territorial constraints. His extraordinary ability to absorb disquiet and bewilderment serves as a catalyst, antenna, and feather that transmutes negative energy into a tilted smile, where anything is possible.

Swarbrooke’s music is characterised by its tumultuous nature, mirroring the intensity of his vocal delivery. Notably, his vocal style defies the modern perception of simplicity as a sign of mediocrity.

Grant’s music blends folk with ambient music, creating a harmonious fusion of nature’s sounds and metaphysical combinations. This fusion results in a compact and effective whole, scaffolding lyrics that pose challenges for those seeking comprehension. However, a sublime bewilderment leads to the zone of intimacy, a sanctuary that demands confidentiality. His writing is not intended as an emotional dump or a rational exposition.

In his verbal creations, mental gyms, hints, and shadows emerge, granting the listener the privilege of perceiving them but not identifying their true nature.

A voice that is an earthquake, punishing, attracting, upsetting, and cleansing the listener’s soul in a liquid that transforms thrill into absolute concreteness watches over, controls, and expands the lyrics.

Two EPs and a single have been analysed by the Old Scribe, who recognises Grant Swarbrooke’s impressive line-up of merits in his English artistry. These autumnal songs, while stopping winter, whisper incomprehensible words to it, employing a powerful and effective play of deception.

When he decides to provide the notes with greater space, one can discern how the visual scenarios are the offspring of a sensitivity that seeks to shorten the gaze towards the sky, with a minimalist choice that does not permit excessive variations, all this not because of a limitation but because of a predisposition to embrace the sound more than to seek the alteration of chords, evoking emotions and providing a substantial satisfaction that, while incomprehensible, permeates the veins.

The debut was truly remarkable: arriving at a juncture when British auteur music was experiencing a crisis of expression and content, “And the World Spins on” emerged as a vibrant kaleidoscope of the senses, comprising four tracks that dispelled the apprehension of sterility that seemed to stifle the potential of auteur music.

In particular, the pursuit of colours prevails over words and production, imparting a distinct set of tension and curiosity.

Subsequent to the E.P. “Sleepers,” the trajectory undergoes a transformative shift, extending the reach of an unstoppable talent: the compositions become more intricate, and the acoustic guitar finds an ideal partner in the electric guitar, launching notes strategically infused with emulsions and invitations to contemplate the earthly realm as a dutiful accompaniment to the dream.

The concluding single, “Luminal Fall,” affirms a fundamental growth: I will elaborate on this aspect in due course, but I find it fitting to believe that the prodigy’s future matured during those delectable yet arduous minutes.

A man who appreciates the  immense support of Huey Morgan of the legendary Fun Lovin’ Criminals: accompanied by his wife, they make a resolute decision to provide unwavering support, surround him with encouragement, and become the initial witnesses to a courageous spirit that transcends the boundaries of the earth.

This is a work, his own, moving and resonant, imbued with its own character, intention, pliability, rigidity, and capacity to enchant.

The nature of this music may appear austere and introspective, yet it offers minute portals that lead to a sanctuary of listening. This allows the bittersweet vision and distinctive guitar playing to become a tense, spasmodic will to penetrate the inner sanctums of one’s own thoughts, a unique characteristic of the greatest music.

The instrumentation is sparse, often evoking the sound of an orchestra in flight, vibrating, and harmonising, as if classical music were a perpetual muse in a state of counsel.

However, the layered, rich, and refined sounds can pose challenges for the listener in fully comprehending them. The percussive balance is impeccable, and there is an impression of a resounding silence within these sounds, serving as a catalyst for enlightenment and a much-needed sense of completeness.

Song by Song 

1. Wake Up

The song commences with an awakening, a moral ascendancy, and a series of openings that transcend the confines of a couple’s relationship. A guitar leads us to Tom McRae, accompanied by a voice that evokes a sense of emotional turmoil and tears. The cunning piano notes create a mantra that establishes a connection between rhythm and harmony, fostering a perceptible will to embrace diverse heights. The music and voice perfectly execute this vision.

2. And the World Spins on

The song delves into the depths of personal pain and the thunderous forces of nature, juxtaposing these tense sounds and chords with an understanding that propels the new acoustic movement to grasp the possibilities it had previously denied itself.

Grant then illuminates the entire piece with a solo that is both daring and transformative. It envelops and vibrates, distorting to welcome the voice that remains almost in the shadows. This transformation elevates the entire piece to the majestic flight of a royal eagle. The sense of perdition hinted at in the lyrics is overshadowed by the realisation of the impact on the ground, leaving no room for despair.

Despite its pop song origins, this piece is veiled in pure, truthful drama.

3 - State of Grace 

The freedom to allow another person to live unhindered is a gamble, an ordeal even difficult to envision. Grant picks up his acoustic guitar, incidentally always accompanied by faint, almost imperceptible atmospheric noises, and decides to offer his voice the role of reviving that vibrant form of ambient folk that captivated the United Kingdom in the 1990s. A diminutive yet powerful acoustic guitar solo propels us into the American Dark Folk genre, where dreams and reality intertwine in this non-ballad.

4 - Days of Pitchford

Slag, lightning, and sonic shavings vibrate in the initial few seconds, and then, amidst the Bad Seeds and David Eugene Edwards, a pleasant, slow struggle ensues to impart a western feel to a message that, despite its wordlessness, conveys the language of fear and confusion. This approach ultimately becomes a perfect metaphor for the current distances.

5 - Sleepers

On a day with limited light, the seagulls of Bath seek the wind. The piano’s notes descend from the sky, and George Wilson’s strings evoke a sense of trepidation.

You live, you make choices, and you sleep: within this circle of senses, the music possesses a direction, guiding the poignancy of an alternative on the brink of sadness to become the foundation upon which tears can be dried.

A few chords, the voice following the seagulls, and the piano lead us into an intimate and uncertain flight, where the Seventies reclaim their former glory with this track that would have been coveted by many.

When beauty achieves this, immersing oneself in emotion forges a new and distinct identity.

6 - Rainbows

What do rainbows hold for Grant?

The electric guitar establishes a captivating atmosphere, drawing listeners into a realm of oblivion, torment, and a glimmer of hope. Martin Murphy’s precise drumming provides a disciplined accompaniment, enhancing the enchanting beauty of the track.

Ultimately, the song transcends genres, blending blues, soul, and pop elements. It transforms into a celestial entity, adorned with rainbows, awaiting its rebirth.

7 - Out of Sea

The song opens with waves and arpeggios, transporting listeners to the vast ocean. The soaring yet hushed lyrics evoke a sense of tranquility, as days pass but love remains steadfast. Piano chimes evoke the French singer-songwriters of the 1950s, leading to an anarchic flight of notes in search of words that can alleviate the daze.

8 - SleepersReprise

The song builds upon the concept of “Sleepers,” exploring its origins and evolution. The ambient approach entrusts the surrounding hissing sounds with the task of nurturing the ravenous voice.

9 - Liminal Fall

The sea and distant boats create a sense of flatness and anticipation, akin to the dramatic introduction. However, the melodic turn of the song delivers a sudden, unexpected impact, akin to a slap or a bruise.

The rhythm gradually builds, culminating in a powerful drumbeat that mirrors the intensity of the voice and words. The drums cease, leaving behind a haunting wail. Martin Murphy’s bass drives the ensemble to perfection.

The song concludes with a guitar’s farewell to dream pop and chaos, achieving a harmonious balance in sound and production. Tears transform into an endless circle, symbolising the transcendence of boundaries and embracing the unknown.

This piece appears to mark the baptism of an artistic era that possesses its identity and can embark on a journey of boundless exploration.

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

21st February 2025

https://open.spotify.com/artist/7aD2kWK5ls9dtcKhX2hxis?si=9Husphg3SQSb4pAyDjxIeA

My Review: Sacred Legion - The Higher Unknown

 Sacred Legion - The Higher Unknown

There are swaddled stars, afraid to feel pain, deliberately slowing the thought of death to prefer the silence of those gagged. When they turn into songs then everything sinks into the precipice of sonic paths, of elegant and malignant traps that use the class of hot metal.

The band from the Frosinone area returns for a record that kills this silly attitude of considering it gothic, Death Rock-loving and similar amenity when, instead, the trio makes itself the spokesperson for a conspicuous transformation.

It becomes an American comic strip with steps in Europe, as the children of Dino Battaglia, Georg Büchner, E.T.A. Hoffman, for talking clouds that, while moving very fast for only twenty-nine minutes, manage to fix an almost violent drag backwards: we find ourselves in the 1800s, with resounding anachronistic moves that obtund, skim over current events and choose the music that ferries everything onto a hypothetical sheet of paper. 

And we find Dino Buzzati and his Desert of the Tartars: the passage of time, destiny, the absurdity of blocked and shocked existentialism find their fixation in these compositions that lacerate the naive propensity for victimhood or pessimism. Rather, we are faced with a ponderation, a discipline of thought that finds support in Zeena Schreck, the true golden nugget of this bundle of compositions. A goddess who knows the spiritual path, the sensible theatricality that blends well with the music of the three, for a desecrating fit full of rust. 

And it is here that Giovanni Drogo appears in the verses in an unconscious manner, but with a precise sense of duty and obedience: these are songs that need patterns, study, a behavioural regime in which the need to give brevity the task of clarifying everything makes them ancient, almost punk, but certainly not gothic. And it is here that things become clear: the shores of those places where crying and feeling unfortunate made souls vulnerable are dead. Fabiano Gagliano rewrites the rules, draws comics, searches for Desert Rock more in the nocturnal dust of early seventies hard rock, which are certainly present, but there is no denying how in the poignancy there is a sonic simplicity that needs no tricks or flames: the sound moves in a single direction without deception, grating nicely on the thousands of bands that waste time searching for an effect deemed ‘right’.

In the album, the floor of notes becomes a howl, a howl, an echo devoid of pomposity as it is invested with a precise responsibility: to be a human and not a mechanical whole.

Songs like splashes of blood, of memories, of detected lies, of precise invitations that shock for their loyalty and depth.

I mentioned Dino Battaglia, and specifically that resounding revival of Edgar Allan Poe's ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’.

Well: these songs take up the trait of a fear that seeks separation from the nightmare in order to have a lonely course, to rage in the pleasure of attitudinal distortions (which are evident here in the grooves) and conclude in a genuflection with big drops of humility through a historical element that the Old Scribe refuses to define as a cover.

Instead, I would say that the song that concludes this second disc is a new switch, logical and sensible, to define not only a love, a good taste, but rather an opening and closing of a temporal circle in which the group rests its creatures within this historic song

Mirko, Tony and Fabiano take rock and put it upside down, not in a cave but in the hemisphere of a filigree that seeks continuous expansion. Scratching guitars, digging bass and drowning drums make the whole thing a nightmare, yes, but sustainable and compatible with the stage geometry of these nine splinters.

The whole must be fast, focused, in a rhythmic condensation in which the only escapes are given by two strategic moves: the recall of two travelling companions from the time that was and a song (well, it's not a coincidence that it's the shortest ...) that opens, and closes in a certain sense, every possible desire to go elsewhere. Sonic, spiritual art, that looks at tradition with respect, a notebook in hand and a pen to take notes. Nothing technological in this work, but rather a plow that digs among the clods muddy by existences madly lost. And then bonfires, witches, dissected souls, saving tears and aspirations as vectors of a well-being that knows the benefit of the doubt. If Satan exists in the verses of Black Sabbath (who I would not cite as the masters of this album, but only as a sacred temple to quickly turn your gaze to), here we find him in the reluctance of the from Frosinone to use the shadow zone to become obligatorily gothic. There is nothing gothic instead, but definitely an attitude to creativity that has only one obvious term of comparison in this work: the Damned, who made up their own stylistic citizenship without asking themselves any questions. The three are free to go wild, to cover their ears, to perform a zonal marking on the rhythm and on the historic psychedelic stripes of that crazy combo that turns out to be the work of the guitars and the bass, which, like nocturnal diviners, immediately bury what they have found.

A sound concept album, either for the attention to sound that must be an investigator, or for the frankness of an emotional framework that however connects to a mental universe made up of years and years of specific studies. Here is the trajectory of the songs becoming indifferent to the current condition. No photography, no evocative presumption, but a lateral look towards a non-world where the stories told are already intuitable from the chords and their short successions, in a clash that certainly makes them, nowadays, unique, without seeking uniqueness...

If an echo dies (the fifth piece of this artistic/human project), what is reborn is the choice, full of good taste, of not being ashamed of the limits of the present, of the approach distorted by no longer being musicians and writers of simple lyrics but connected to depth.

A bundle of the whole compressed into languid rebellious wounds, oxygenated by practicality and not by dreams: a powerful leap towards an evident sarcasm, a crowbar that uncovers boredom and kills it.

We were talking about two presences that make it all a generous Thank You from the three musicians and composers: Adolphe Le Duc and Matteo Bracaglia who are anything but last-minute repechages; they are flowers that fall skillfully between the furrows to cleanse, perfume and enlarge this emotional crater that makes respect a curve where, at the end of its trajectory, there is a sensorial embrace. Stoner Rock and the aforementioned Desert Rock (which are nothing but the elegant splinters of that Birmingham and London that between 1969 and 1972 would have landed in the USA like a relentless plague) are the primitive and most obvious stylistic suspects but then, like the wind that has no masters, the stylistic territories know rapid deviations, in a theatre that, more than pain, is a container full of slime, heavy distortions, even pop lightness as in the final track, in which we arrive at a miracle: on one side the band that wrote this pop pill soaked in glam feathers and on the other that alternative indie attitude that was the territory of the Pixies in their first steps.

References, stretching, for a muscular and elusive record. Above the Frosinone area there is a miracle that is going back in time to create an extraordinary event that will certainly not have a filiation: and it is in this uniqueness that an honest prodigy reveals itself…

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

13-2-2025

https://batcaveproductions.bandcamp.com/album/the-higher-unknown

My Review: Mogwai - The Bad Fire

 

Mogwai - The Bad Fire

A desert finds its source in the sonic bridge of a time spent leaving traces of vibrations in the hope of a landing place, where getting lost and finding oneself is but a beginning.

It was 1995 and everything was falling apart, in the middle heart of a decade in which beauty and ugliness were convincing without osmosis, without megaphones and without silences at the same time.

A couple of Scottish friends chose an epitaph as a sprint, a flash to be extinguished by research, theoretical, on how sound could be enslaved by the beauty of rhythmics and harmonies in search of a parasol. They have always rejected the definition of a Post-Rock band, of pioneers of that genre, and they have done well: if you spend time with the wrong ones, seizing the moment is practically impossible.

The new album does not celebrate 30 years of their career, but rather starts with cycles of chemotherapy of a young daughter.

Nothing artistic but the desire to silence a frustration, a pain, a neurotic avalanche of expanding explosions. Dowsing songs are born, emotions that become expedients, the harmonic rustle of a strange series of conversions, here elevated to the emotional carpet that leaves burrs and flowers overweight, because this work narrates, explains, brings happiness to life through temporal and educational seasons, in a jolt calculated to anaesthetise fears and useless tensions.

The band's intuitions, balustrade and strong moral, since the days of pompous Brit-Pop, have built in the sonic garden of these fingertips a series of intentions that in The Bad Fire find a new resource: to create not only cinematic flows, sound fables and the possibility that imagination has no gags, but rather baggage and handholds, in a story that specifies how the human soul is the first of the planets. The choice of misleading titles (always an attitude that appeared as a desecrating act not to make the pieces a serious thing), reaffirms the concept that in this unique, almost purely instrumental mode live words, thoughts, impulses, brakes and the sparkle of a beam that, between noise and sweetness, defines understanding as a fortuitous gesture and not as a sum of capacities.

A hymn to joy, one to the consecration of the mood that must be taken seriously as adults, one to the pressure of mutant spaces, and yet always with an innovative and surprising willingness to allow joy to tread these grooves. And it is pop, rock, dream pop, alternative, psychedelia, but above all a serious game that searches for the sky and slaps it down with some textures where electronics is by no means an icy thermometer, but rather a new way of generating warmth. 

Diversified approaches, instruments used as a melting pot to which new instructions can be given, to generate intoxicating layers where it is not the journey that counts, but remaining anchored in one's own emotional territory.

One loses oneself in these flights, in these voids, in these jumps and in these frictions, to compose unshakable dreams, doubts and certainties, not to flee but to encounter a world free of syllables and sterile and useless approximations.

Here come Pink Floyd, the Velvet Underground, Television and an impressive series of bald notes, without burrs, without presumptions: the sound (father/master and servant) is this time only the splinter that leaves more pleasure than pain, offers the idea that in the uncertainty of meaning those musical bundles find a cosy bed.

Stuart and Barry have never written songs: they have sought refuge where precisely Post-Rock has placed barriers, stakes and stylistic and attitudinal boundaries. The two are intelligent souls, privateers of the unknown who seek out followers and on the backs of their scores leave the dew of these notes stuttering but never waning, never falling, always, instead, in an ascending flight. What is torpid the two disinfect it, giving the other two members a free garden in which to drop duty and seek a game where hypothesis is never a sterile blotting paper.

Here's My Bloody Valentine and the shoegaze period from 1991 to 1993 offer the Scottish band some trails to follow, with more sadness and nastiness...

There is no pressure, much less conditioning in these streams: music as open windows in the middle of a meadow with no houses, to establish a pact that transcends limits, to produce, as a primary objective, a series of songs that are the words, the gestures, the steps that go round and round in the grooves of a vinyl record that then rises up and leaves everyone without a foothold. Poetry? No! It is definitely an attempt to celebrate a new behavioural vocabulary, in which the disregard for time, art and the obligatory can be anaesthetised. Notes as drops under glass, voices as silent solos without the need for beautiful singing.

Perhaps these roads that invoke an imminent emotional perspective can also bring about a suspension of that sand that in the hourglass only knows gravity. Mogwai create a science-fiction epic, hydrating the habits of experiencing listening as enclosures and finally determining an ordeal that knows how to show rays of sunshine and rainbows on a festive day.

Organs, pianos, harpsichords, mellotrons: these are instruments that are discreetly positioned in the flows, never protagonists but rather gregarious in a complexity that, track after track, manages to make its way into comprehension. But there are others, because in the clamorous work of production it was decided to make the grafts subtle, leaving the solos the task of not being redundant, but the first pupils of a timid respect for an ordered puzzle conceived to leave the ears disoriented in the belly of a flight. There are no signs of tension, of awkwardness, of discord: does that seem little?

They are the directors of an avant-garde that, when free of the desire for useless definitions, will be able to indicate new strategies. The 90s, after all, were an infection for them and, in this new millennium, anything that allows for temporal jumps, between kangaroos and shrimps, can establish the effectiveness of a pleasant confusion that makes the mind a colourful ivy...

The basses are at times unfocused, the guitars often take on the guise of stunned keyboards, the drumming often seems to anticipate: yes, there are glaring errors on the album, on a technical level, not everything fits together perfectly and it is precisely this element that makes it an analogue record in the time of digital, leaving imprecision a wonderful sceptre.

There are no dreams in the tracks, no screams, no exaggerations: everything appears as a village in flight with no intention of taking up residence, a walking with curiosity to precede consciousness.

The time has come to look these compositions in the face and give them a dagger lined with grace, slow and sensual, where they can kiss this hill of running petals...

Song by Song

1 - God Gets You Back

A synth opens the sky, sounds like a restrained delirium, a slowness with the feeling that a speed is imminent and contagious. But it is in this loop that strings of guitars are deposited with a restrained reverb to hold the tension like a switch that explains, from the outset, what will be illuminated in the continuation. When the drumming decides to present the bill to the awkward primordial beauty, one realises how the Scottish band has found an orange oil in the veins of intuition. Hypnosis and delirium...

2 - Hi Chaos

We were talking about mistakes, about non-synchronicity, and here we are faced with one of those moments: where there is a space revealed and not hidden, the sky gods spread smiles. What happens in the second track? We enter into the fullness of the album's title which, in Scotland, means Hell. We meet it, then, in its earthquakes, in its exaltations, in the lanes of thunderstorms and of a chaos to which, like a mantra to which one would like to say no, one entrusts one's pleasure, with the final part of the song teaching how Post-Rock with Mogwai is a sterile and repetitive exercise. Here they play with fire that slows and beats, for it is in slowness that pain finds its perfect throne. The final guitars and bass drive the effects back into a beautiful bath of humility, leaving the song in its disarming perfection...

3 - What Kind of Mix is This?

The introduction (a celestial mantra celebrating Television's second album as they take a walk with Cardiacs) resembles a distorted chain looking for a void to fall into: minimalist until the feet reveal how the pedalboard is just a game to create quality and not hide technical limitations... Here, then, is a swinging hiss that is embraced by silk sticks and fingers that produce wonderful toxins on a bass keyboard...

4 - Fanzine Made Of Flesh

Mogwai are punk, totally punk, punk without identity, madmen without strategy, painters who paint nothingness. 

And when they speak, when they sing, when they are melodic vocals over a distorted, deserted bass, then you understand how the talent to invite a pop refrain to show its skin is nothing more than the centre of gravity of that furious musical and cultural genre...

5 - Pale Vegan Hip Pain

Minimalism, fear that seeks a caress, a tear that doesn't want to die, a winter that fears the sun's spring rays: these are the protagonists of this ballad so close to prayer, for a brilliant thermal condition that seems to land in the confines of Kurosawa, on an evening when the cinema could be the only closet in which to hide. The track starts out slow, proceeds in the same way, but performs a crazy miracle: when the cluster of guitar notes seeks descent, here is the synth, with mammoth sweetness, accompanying this trail of water to the edges of a compelling, enveloping sadness…

6 - If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some Of The Others

You try to relax, in these seven minutes, in which everything sounds like a thesis of a drama searching for wings. Instead: Mogwai prefer tension, they remove the protection from the emotional cables and keep them in a bain-marie, here suspense is an old trick but still capable of conveying consciousness and trembling. A tale, a journey where the instruments experience the intensity of bubbles held by the hair...

7 - 18 Volcanoes

The ignorant always stop at precipitation, at definition without patience. Here is a perfect example: in the first few seconds a foolish multitude might think of a combination of Sonic Youth and Marlene Kuntz. But the band plays at recapturing the magic of krautrock without photocopying it, throwing themselves into the circle of respect for the most hypnotic Beatles to the point of kissing the Velvet Underground with these driven, magnetic distortions. 

The last few minutes are a sonic cry, slowing down the beats by sedating the will of the bass and drums to be the architects of deflagrating surprises. And yes, there is a crescendo, but with simply perfect reins...

8 - Hammer Room

Let there be a rainbow, an afternoon party in a valley crowded with peace and beautiful dreams. Baroque music lends its flank, but then this combo throws itself on the petals kneaded with reflections and everything becomes modern, even more effervescent to the point of allowing the snare drums to direct the sounds towards a robotics that seems to create the right pause in this album that never ceases to confirm and surprise. The guitar solos are minimalist, precise, without smearing of unnecessary excess effects, and when the sound becomes a syringe, the party is over...

9 - Lion Rumpus

Again light, wind, lightness, with the seventies prog children longing for contact. The only track where the lead guitar searches for the bull's eye, but careful listening reveals how the synchronisation of time-space leads the impression to become a certainty: the band has found a perfect excuse to give a short song a feeling of eternity

10 - Fact Boy

There's no two without three: the album ends with a parade of lights, of rolls that bless the melody and structure of a prolonged sound that seeks celestial ascent. The rock here sweeps, wanting no footholds, wrestling with the stop-and-go at the slightest end, to leave these continuous snares the benefit that the metrics can also be a distorted impression. And it concludes in a colourful jaunt with the hope that all the grim but not serious moments of this jewel can generate the memory of a period that does not feed memory to find awareness...

   Stuart Braithwaite (Guitar, Vocals)

Barry Burns (Guitar, Piano, Synthesizer, Vocals)

Dominic Aitchison (Bass Guitar)

Martin Bulloch (Drums)

Producer: John Congleton

Label: Rock Action

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

25th January 2025