My Review: Midas Fall - Cold Waves Divide Us

Midas Fall - Cold Waves Divide Us

The lane of elegance has a remarkable space in dreams, a teeming of intact fragments that enthrall listening and viewing souls, transporting shadows into the spotlight. What ensues is ecstasy in repetition, amidst oscillations and tremors. Music can represent all this as conduit, investigation and a thick containing web. If the Scottish band Midas Fall does this, then myocardial paralysis is instantly guaranteed, as the genesis of fragility in search of oxygen. The duo (now a trio) performs the most remarkable miracle one could only remotely hope for: they write a live genuflection, an invisible concert, directly in our rooms, like a private, unique, hardly avoidable affair, to signal a first incandescent act of total falling in love, as the tail end of a long career in which the fifth disc does nothing more than collect, sow, invent from hypothetical oscillations of the mood a defined, precise structure, an invasion of the lane of our pretended equilibrium.

Tabula rasa yes, but feathery, oxygenated with algid protean beauty, in the midst of the circle of emotions that are only the tail end of a mental palace that verbalises instincts, radiant days in the half-light and the fatigue of manifesting the talent of these compositions that attract the pulse towards the fatigue of containing them all.

More intimate, less dreamy (it sounds like an oxymoron, a blasphemy, but sooner or later you'll realise it's not so...), raw with the melancholy that underlines the power of these drops that, even when they fall hard, know how to use noise like a feather soaked in sunshine...

Elizabeth Heaton and Rowan Burn are two fairies who ignore the success, the poses, the public needs that only sow dispersion. They collect the breaths, the thoughts, and, with a kitchen whisk, condense their intimate quest into a golden helmet where everything is amalgamated and placed in the fridge of the heart. They have grown, they have generated sound pills not as children but as brushes and colours to be thrown into the wind. 

Now, more than ever, they live on continuous play, a coming and going from the core of forms, a very careful use of branches, in which post-rock, progressive and shoegaze are glued to the material of mental penetration, making the choice that each scalpel is capable of not stopping on the first layer of the skin of these songs. This explains the intensity, the restrained explosion to generate, rather, a more silent din, circumstantiated by the need to use notes as glue, as paper on which to write an irrepressible DNA: that of description. 

The willingness to call in Michael Hamilton, also a multi-instrumentalist and producer, allowed for the extension of the songwriting phase, as if indeed one more member would make this ‘concert’ that is Cold Waves Divide Us an unrepeatable exchange of gifts, in a period not of grace but of real capacity in search of a permanent fixative, to allow this live performance to never end.

One finds oneself in the vision of the world, in the lock of a door where each of us lives the secrecy of our existence, in the dump of faded dreams, of wills devoid of bite, and then anaesthetises joy in order to make it come to life with these small notes that, set, become boulders full of mountain flowers, in flight, enchanted and enchanting, without end.

The three of them are the funnel into which every tear falls, every intimate emotional resurrection, because they know how to dig into the vicissitudes of the individual expressions of musical notes, to correct contemporary music's unwise choice to seek success. True art always has its back to the audience...

Wedges, firecrackers, kisses with blue lipstick and demijohns of wine enter these songs to inebriate, stun, move and make listening a swirling inferno.

Ethereal music that warms the fire buried in the veins, adrenalin that comes out of the anaesthesia of mediocre listening, continuous elaborations on the structures that make every second of listening a millennium in the beats of our heart. Stunned angels, wandering among the cradles of needs not granted to us, reproducing enchantments and suggestions, drawing impetuses and reflections, together.

The movements, the twists, the conduction of the guitars are linked to the strings, the rarely powerful drumming, the bass that measures the shape condition of the dreams and supports them, and then to the expression of the uvula, on which sooner or later the Old Scribe will write a book.

But, unlike all my colleagues, I would like to stress that the musical parts are the real oil well, the vocal fuse, an embrace that allows each of the band members to explore a different universe. Of course, hers is the best in the last twenty years and her singing is simply devastatingly beautiful, irrepressible, the mother of every shuddering tear, a sensory spring that smears the face with liquids in continuous dispersion.

But she is not alone. Not only does she conquer and penetrate. One must have the courage to affirm that the perfect music suggests the perfect voice to stand on the same stage and bring listening where mediocrity has no access.

Art as a cloud waiting for thunder, for thunder waiting to sleep on a cloud, with a piano in the middle and strings spelling out outdated vowels, in the fantasy of an unlikely encounter. 

It is not Dream Pop, it is not Gothic, it is not a genre: what it is remains relegated to mystery. Films of films that never existed, painted in a workshop far from accessibility, allow the coldness contained in the album's title to tremble, to become a frenetic fragment, to evaporate pretensions and to disturb the soul. Undeterred, stuck in the magic pill of the unknown, this path of notes creates prog symphonies in a veiled way, diving into the mode of the goniometer and ink: defining, without smearing.

The grace, the feather that does not accelerate too much, the rocking of the voice between scratches and clusters of foils, introduce the thought to a location never considered before: the confusion of bewilderment before this unbearable beauty.

The strings, the synths, not only hover but point their feet, claim space and penetrate the eardrums with that sweetness that disarms and overpowers. Combined with the voice and guitar, they become lead with petals in plain sight....

Avant-garde, originality are grounds that belong to the memory (in the musical sphere certainly), but how beautiful is it to note the exception that lives in this swarm, in this beehive, in this roar of gentle strings?

Evocative harmonies, flashes of notes, syncopated bass strokes, almost invisible patterns, and then the flash, in a sweat of blood that sets off from Scotland to make a beautiful journey into our obscene ignorance. Here, then, is this record becoming the master of a perverse joy.

The sound is omnivorous, it devours the walls of the pentagram, and perfectly describes how much everything derives from classical music, from that pot that still boils the water of musical art, without hesitation. The stillness disturbs those who experience tidal waves, it disrupts them and makes them angry. The three of them, young marmots in the forest of pain, search for the leaves to make the intuitive films branch out, crossing the boundaries of the conscious, immobilising the unconscious, and then establishing the shifts of the thoughts that arise, chase each other, and bring us down.

‘Cold waves divide us’: this is the translation of the title, a deception, a truth, a clarification, a perfect ploy to focus attention on relationships, with oneself, with others, to create an emotional jungle in the Arctic pole. The cold does not melt but only chooses the best temperature to preserve and, therefore, to remember. And the album reminds us of how the ancient fragrances need a reminder, like a mental cocaine to pull up, in our foggy brains.

Crying is a gift that the soul offers to your belief that you are stronger than anything. When the songs change your mood and the flow of thoughts becomes intolerable and ungovernable, then you realise that you are faced with an enormous power, not equal to your own, and therefore you come to terms with an enormous fragility. In this case positive and capable of making you a chick in its first day of life. These are unknown information, not tracks, pills of atoms in a square sphere, not tracks, gaseous flames in which to faint from the beauty and certainly not from their toxicity, but never tracks: it would be diminishing their value if we thought that. 

Midas Fall arrive in the hemisphere of emptiness: their sublime talent (not touchable, but only usable as long as one does not enter their gaseous dumps), descends into the perimeter of perfection with the only true Masterpiece of the last ten musical years.

There is a known and an unknown that together tear apart the certain and program it for a dutiful escape.

If we really want to consider it an album, let's just say that the multitude of forms of communication here are assembled and amalgamated to leave one utterly astounded. 

We move the light, behind our backs, and enter these floral craters, one by one...

Song by Song

1 - In the Morning We'll Be Someone Else

The beginning of this masterpiece is an investigation of stylistic form, a hint of nerves, a beating in the dust: Dry, melodic, nuclear in the effect of a collapsing intimacy, it uses the atmosphere of a dream, with the slowness and drumming attempting to advance the brushes of these distant fragrances, while the vocals take the electronic part of the piece by the hand, in the chemical outpost of an ethereal manifestation of light that leaves, abandoning all comparisons with what the band had written before. Overture and torture: one immediately weeps with the shoegaze guitar lifting notes to a distant sky...

2 - I am Wrong

The rhythm enters like the spectacle of a decadent forest in the process of containment: the perspective plan is that of a race, instead, although the musical cadence suggests a tribal dance, sadness and melancholy govern these pills of ancient guitars, very close to the early eighties, when little was needed to say a lot... The coda of the song is an electric circuit of clouds and drumming that hypnotises the song form, to grant the return of Elizabeth who does justice with her vocal discipline.

Different musical genres mute here, cross over and then become spectators in the final seconds where everything becomes synthesis...

3 - Salt

Memories of Evaporate return, reminding us of their last album from five years ago: there are compositions born to be a racket inside the six-string, supported by ethereal vocals, almost demure strings and orchestration that passes from ancient to modern with ease, only to become a pill of the most profound post-rock sadness and misery...

4 - In This Avalanche

Elizabeth's lyrics are stings, the music the fabric over which she sweeps in her contemplation gentle and kind only in appearance. A music box, in the form of a loop, paves the way for a harmony that centrings the energies, then explores the sky when the voice closes in silence. Piano and synth make love to a guitar that smells of Dream Pop but is free of conditioning. And indeed she does not miss her appointment with an imaginative attitude that takes her elsewhere. A lullaby can also be a wicked but enchanting arrow...

5 - Point of Diminishing Return

The only instrumental track is instead an atypical Gregorian chorus: everything is elevated to prayer, modern, atheistic, disengaged from faith, to become a post-rock birth close to that of Leech, to give the notes a space on which to insert inserts and textures that conclude the path by inventing the rule of the sudden limit. Glacial, austere, with a sublime sadness, the song acts as a perfect bridge between the first part of the album (attentive and thoughtful) and the second (gasping with a silk jacket in her hair), in order to stun the senses and capture attention: where a splendid voice is absent, there can be music that reproduces the effect, and this happens, inexorably, on this occasion...

6 - Monsters

Once upon a time there was Mazzy Star. Low. And a plethora of bands looking for the voice to perfect the artistic path. It happens, in this case, that two parallel universes meet. In the meantime, everything becomes a harrowing episode in which guitars look at the thin horizon between post-rock and shoegaze to become the progressive form of an ancient rock. And Elizabeth's kills all reluctance, to the point of fogging the glass with sobs from the snare drum and guitars in gaseous exploration...

7 - Atrophy

Where the sky ends, Atrophy lives: the sense of death amidst the bubbling of a song that rapes the heart and a guitar footstep that advances to become an ethereal, rarefied dream, convince us that this episode is so capable of destroying defences that the soul concentrates on the heartbreaking farewell of forces in free fall. A mantra that leaves burrs in the morning of a resounding insight: drawing for real the place where it all ends...

8 - Cold Waves Divide Us

The synthesis, the prophecy, the passionate flurry of a day in which contact is made with discomfort: this track is the safe of the band's new impetus, the probe that from slowness and conceptual precision comes out widening the rhythm, the visual perimeter, and makes the loop and the delay of the guitar shine to concentrate a musical truth that is indisputable for them, which is that of never repeating a rainy day without allowing themselves multiple inputs. Here then, the musical genres present here are diverse but, given the invoice of the composition, they hide their noses, leaving only their arms to be glimpsed...

9 - Little Wooden Boxes

Nature becomes a musical note.

The breath of instruments a blink of an eye.

Words like swans in a polluted flight.

What lives on in the album's penultimate composition is a gentle and clean reinforcement of the stylistic code of this incredible journey: dilations, incursions of single chords and the slowness of the progression so close to Post-Rock without, however, entering into those parameters. The voice, with its evocative mode, explores the progression without following its shadows, and it is pure miracle of a perfect combo...

10 - Mute

The incipit is cavernous, a wreck on a nervous wave, a malaise that relies on the voice to create a short roar, not dry, but perpetually constricted by the few notes of a bewitched piano full of evil beauty, to prevent the whole from dying.

It needs no refrains, no boorish gimmicks as it is entirely similar to the typical mode of Nick Cave's old Bad Seeds: give the bass the sceptre and then invest in the fluorescent mantle of a musical apparatus to back it up. 

To arrive at the dilation, the ductility of Shoegaze that governs mystery and Post-Rock, here in the guise of a restraining magician.

Sacred, virgin, nefarious in the positive sense, the song closes this masterpiece like a drop of dew: let beauty be celebrated amidst the rose garden of endless tears...

Alex Dematteis (Vecchio Scriba - Old Writer)

Musicshockworld

Salford

7th December 2024

https://open.spotify.com/album/7HE5PoausnMjJAoco3miw2?si=PhDhAlwiQtGZEgr23y6j1Q

https://www.midasfall.com/home

My Review: At Swim Two Birds - Quigley’s Point

 At Swim Two Birds - Quigley's Point

Vini Reilly is a magician who rents heavenly scenes, Johnny Marr turns them into wind, Roger Quigley puts both on his golden fingertips and rents small rooms in which to make dreams solid. 

This incipit might be enough to say where the stylistic figure of a painter who has written an album about his relationship with a very sweet girl dwells: the music reproduces her features, her accommodating laugh, the smoke dust of perpetually lit pipes and the desire to use the six-string as a loving tam tam always at the disposal of his lightning bolts.

There is no past at the time of writing these letters, which seek in memory a suspension from pain, a scream made obedient to the nature of a mind devoted to embrace.

Nourishing the tears of continuous anaesthesia is a great effort. He knows this and decides to publish his disappointment side by side with grains of joy, with a more subtle songwriting than that of The Montgolfier Brothers who, with Mark Tranmer, had made us discover how Nick Drake and Tim Buckley, with less emphasis and more flair for storytelling, could sound like good guys, as well as beautiful.

Then the end (Roger has known many...) brought about a return to Salford, he who had been born there, leaving Manchester with only a few monthly episodes.

In a bored room waiting for an earthquake, the blond songwriter fills his ashtrays and sheet music, with arpeggios that move from American folk to Portuguese fado, to the most intimate dream pop, and then writes words capable of caressing the hair of his memories.

His singing is respectful, without bitterness, leaving the disintegration of dialogue to the long arpeggiated solos.

He uses, for his first real solo episode, street recordings, his walks in the parks, birds, work in progress, sequestering the fog of Weaste and Langworthy and then surrounding them with electronics and primordial software to chill his sad breathing.

He whispers into the microphone, catches his breath amidst clouds of smoke and then throws himself into writing atmospheres that seem to have been born for a film in which faces and stories are imbued with uncertainty and desolation but, believe the Old Scribe, there have been many laughs on the stave and the certainty that a record is not a collection, but an important and decisive seeding.

Anticipating part of the New Acoustic Movement, which used patterns, midi, soft and never invasive electronics, the good Roger established a new boundary between disclosure and mystery.

To understand this, one only has to pay attention to the long musical suites where a phrasing is repeated but never with the intention of becoming a loop, given the typical inserts of the 1960s arrangers.

At that precise moment, everything goes dark, the stories disappear and the music becomes a mute mouth capable of swinging emotions.

Nervous, polished fingers glide over the neck of his Takamine, with the diploma of beatification, given the perfect technique and the ability to often double the six-string with precise work assignments, like twins speaking different languages, without lacking in understanding.

His background has no place here: his listenings were aimed at the music of the city, whereas in this solo debut we are wandering around the globe and through time, as if true freedom were the distancing from reality.

And indeed the lyrics are deceptions, torture, like the music: it sounds like a magical collective trying to reach into creation to embrace listeners.

Instead Dante and his Inferno are right in these grooves, in walks with fake clothes and so much real pain to sift through hope.

Brazil, Portugal, Swinging London, Paris and the writer after whom his project was named with a fabulous novel are the main protagonists, followed by a plethora of tangled dreams.

Sarah Records credited Quigley with knowing by heart how to stumble with pure sanity through the convoluted guitar exercises of which Reilly and Marr were absolute masters.

The strings, the often deliberately odd rhythms and the production that tried to anaesthetise the abundance of sounds are the most intense moments of this Salfordian vessel that remembers well the harbour and the struggles with Liverpool.

To the latter city Roger gives a lot of space: in the introductions of several songs the magical atmosphere of Merseyside in 1975 and 1976 seem to pop up like free-flowing moonbeams.

I think, however, that the most difficult aspect to sustain is the inclination of the late talent to say goodbye, between goodbyes and farewells that embrace each other, making listening a wound, just like the writing of these hypnotic verses, but also capable of being delightful obstinacies full of smiles and charm.                                 Certain absences are striking, certain decisions that have led to the choice of making the interpretative layer uninflated except in the episode I Need Him, in which his devastation is transformed into an accommodating gentle form of words stolen from a reality that established the end of a relationship.

Two different sides, with structures and dynamics that revolve within a projectuality that provides a longitudinal path, capable, that is to say, of transmitting the moulting of the skin of his soul, like a pitchfork renting kisses from hay. 

The first part is a faithful account of ancient happiness, the second a bitter realisation of the precipice, and indeed the stylistic scenarios change.

Remarkable is the hue in the last track made of dream pop confetti, from which Tom McRae and Radiohead then stole profusely.

A systematic mode of freedom paid dearly, the evolution of his style will bring him back into the arms of Tranmer, if only for a moment.                                 But this album is an unparalleled exercise, whether in romance with the black coat and the eyes still searching for a mouth to touch, or in songs that make you reflect on how happiness is only the outpost of the atomic bomb...

A record that generated mental orgasms and applause from critics: never before had fragmentations been heard to create connections with softness, with the polite propensity to grate the less hard side of a decade that seemed to prefer noises to whispers.

Indeed, certain experiences touch more when one has to sharpen one's listening.

And after more than twenty years it seems that the secrets of this jewel continue to emerge, making the face of his compositions a splendid Greek amphitheatre where poetry is an inferior art: Roger's verses are immediate and reflective, not seeking memory, but rather a way of giving each moment a quick escape…

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

1st December 2024

https://open.spotify.com/album/4r8D9GORVR1xg7sMUS7hjl?si=QSgE7qCjRmaOU7nBRsQBvA

My Review: BIPOLAR EXPLORER - Memories of the Sky

 Bipolar Explorer - Memories of the Sky

Three survivors act as a radio bridge to the earthly epic of disintegrated souls, blown up in a sky that only wishes to keep the memory of what happened: the reasons for the disaster are contemplated, the seeds of the end are developed with sounds (and not songs) that, besides narrating, excludes (with very few exceptions) the song form. It seems that in the head of the sole author of this mammoth project (Michael Serafin-Wells) there is a computer attached to a crater, with worms, raptors, slag, shavings, hammers and an avalanche of telluric tremors illuminating the vault of heaven in celebration of a predictable defeat.

Thus, millennial paths are created, tales that exclude singing but involve the crooning and storytelling of Summer Serafin and Sylvia Solanas, who are nothing less than female angels with tears in their vocal chords.

The initial Big Bang is nothing compared to this procession of lava, burrs and gasps, in the burning graveyard of an apnoea dream. 

The words move like tired comets while the Moog Synth, the bowed guitar, the percussion are patches of a wound compressed between these sonic sheets that sink moment after moment.

It sounds like a flight, Birdy's (and indeed that Peter Gabriel who wrote the soundtrack might think he had found grandchildren far more warrior-like and swaggering than he), in which what is seen turns into the due exaggeration of sounds like genuflecting light poles. Everything is heartfelt but slow, raising tension, embarrassment, annoyance and the certainty that it is not pleasantness that strikes our bellies. And it is from there that the sound transforms into the transition and translation of a path that finds the barrage of an era that no longer has any visibility.

A psychedelic journey into the madness of slowed-down prog, into tiny approaches to the Velvet Underground and Pink Floyd, when, that is, we can listen to almost songs...

They are, however, moments, errant flashes, a micro-world that cannot move forward. Not only is Michael a visionary, but he proceeds with the eleven compositions of the first disc, and then in those of the second disc he disturbs the typical nightmares of the industrial music of the early days, the English music of 1976 to be clear. Hence the astonishment: a New York project that has lived in the Land of Albion since before the appearance of human beings. Epic, granitic, devastating, this twelfth album of theirs and fifth double deepens the need to make harmony subtle and instead confront the molecular deconstruction of pop, rock and, as mentioned earlier, the song form.

The guitar is the mother who comforts her children, and it is all the work of Michael Serafin-Wells, craftsman of time, holder of the sceptre of the atom that becomes a moment and, extraordinarily, repeatable. Here the applause must go off, trembling and nervous: this talented researcher and developer of the destruction of all artistic ease puts on his helmet, blindfolds and scratches history, geography, enters the nuclear chemist's office building his bomb, postatomic. One finds oneself in a bowl of sand in which black notes descend like mad scalpels.

An obscene, terrible, heavy account, where the air dies in the expositional glaciality of echoes and reverberations, delays and mechanical robotic repetitions in which the rhythm is never sustained by the drums but by the loops of a vigorous ipad determined to instil fear and continuous hallucination.

Nature, be it birds, fish or whatever, is the only one that seems to have dignity, the only one to have survived, and when the bells come, there is no doubt that it is the wind that rings them.

Experimentation in the German sound workshops of 1961 and 1962 would be horrified at this mixture of mishaps, sonic outposts and attitudinal clichés that seek human and ideal loops to slam into the bowels of an idyllic tremor. The debacle of storytelling cannot provide empathy for an accommodating mode. 

Indeed.

What happens is an avalanche of last breaths in decadent flight, in search of the earthly underbelly, like a liturgical but agnostic deposition of intent: there is no God in this record simply because man has disappeared altogether, and from his ashes these fragments were born.

They are suspended and then torn visions, orgasms of moon particles celebrating corroded silence, monstrous creatures emerging from the bodies of memories, in a distorted and fulminating assemblage.

There are no long arpeggios but notes, clusters of notes, crooked notes, notes without the possibility of a stave to worship their power.

It is continual destruction, fragmentation and never dreamed of diffusion: real nightmares are slow, dysmorphic, wild and abrasive.

In certain moments of the album we understand the importance of Television and a brief part of Virgin Prunes' career (A New Form Of Beauty) when the approximation of a musical parquet found space in the murderous instinct of reckless phrasing. 

Stars plummet, the ellipse changes its mind and the streets become hypnotised warehouses of memory. In order to realise all this chaos, the parameters of fantasy are narrowed down and we indulge in obsession, like patients of a compulsory health treatment laughing at the non-communication between the parts.

But, a fundamental aspect of this work, is the NON-COMMUNICATION, there is no talking and no listening, but everything is fried reasoning, with doses of drugs scattered within the constant hissing of this basal noise.

One finds oneself considering certain groups as ancient ancestors of this staggering enactment of obscene cruelty: one should imagine how the non-music of these twenty-two decomposed molecules are nothing less than a new testament, a new ascending score, because, for real, everything that falls finds a way to rise with greater circumspection.

There is no joy, nothing sunny, just a high atomic mushrooming that seems to seek a base to rest bitterness and desolation.

Of Neo-Folk music, this double album has the sense of synthesis.

Of industrial music, it has the bloodiness of a continuous laceration against truths.

From classical music it has everything: the modesty, the ardour, the theatricality seeking paralysed applause on a working day.

The party is an unseemly cry that cannot attend.

Of Shoegaze remains the abundance of controlled distortion.

Of Dream Pop the slab after a dead dream.

Of Rock the idea that everything dies....

What remains is the smell of a tragedy, a song with no listening ears, an electric chair with high voltage but no muscular reactions.

To put it simply: a project that excites the Old Scribe because one finds oneself in the future, with the right doses of terror and ambivalence  tearing composition after composition.

Stoic is the intention to distort the process of approaching the listening, while what lives between these grooves is a persistent rejection of the audience, human footsteps are not desired and the waves of the sea contaminated by asbestos and the traces of oil on the seagulls' wings (among the absolute protagonists of this LP) are preferred, to connect with the pain that synthesises a proscenium and an abandonment.

One finds oneself, so well, in Poe's amniotic sacs, with his neuroses, and in the spectacular stylistic conversion of the leader of Psyco TV: a continuous twinning with youthful, non-senile dementia. The events of a time curled up in cadaverous sounds and female voices submerged in the din, like moving tombstones waiting for the evil grin.

Magnetic and cruel, the story of the arresting dream vibrates in full credibility given the thickness of this convex system, which allows an escape from all acceptance.

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

29th November 2024

https://bipolarexplorer.bandcamp.com/album/memories-of-the-sky