My Review: Chants Of Maldoror - Ritual Death

Chants of Maldoror - Ritual Death

A bee's nest dwells in the crater of the sky, aboard a vehicle that transports it between different forms of entry into studies and patrols, and in which four insects make us aware of what is happening. Time, spectres, telluric trends, suspicions, dramas, religious debate, respect for death, assassinations, wise human genuflections, the pitfalls of existence: this is only the beginning of this exhibition of boiling matter, where the content turns out to be a sound beam that unleashes spirits and sets them free, through contaminations and apparently indigestible fluids, with a blackness that becomes the light to see the intensity of a process that knows evolution and its opposite.

The four bees from Frosinone and the surrounding area put on a cassette the magnetic mixing and procession process of a weeping enchantment, a traversal of the known and lesser-known conditions of grief, of the symbolic fascination dear to these minds pregnant with interest, giving the occult, the probing of signs, the belligerent bubble of discoveries the task of making it all a matter only apparently related to music. Listening involves the sacrifice of personal turmoil, an unexpected detumescence, an unexpected, violent, never approximate healing rite, within a funereal manipulation that sees two genres of music not being the sense but the means through which things are shown rather than heard, thus giving astonishment the chance to be matter on display, a new excuse for the doors of perceptions to exhibit a long dress full of lace of souls truly capable of not being afraid.

Seven rough-skinned candelabra wander the aisles of space, making us feel their breath, in a tangle of tensions and excruciating pains that seek no consolation: we are so inebriated before such intensity and introspection that, at the end of listening, we seem to have experienced a series of mirages in which the celestial vault has wanted to deliver heavy but necessary secrets for the awareness of a knowledge that has become, track after track, more than necessary.

Welcome, then, to the grandchildren of the Count of Lautréamont, who lay their sonic garland on the planks of a bleak, excruciating theatre, full of splinters and claws, in which the rhythm, the form, the density of the songs fill the whole with pride and devastation. In Italy, such a perceptive quality had never before been experienced. There is no need to catalogue, to throw these wise creatures into the cauldron of silly definitions, but rather we should all find ourselves in the emotion of a psychedelic and alchemical journey through an uncovered temple, like an enchantment that can be touched.

It is useless to go fossilising our curiosity within what can make us remember what we listen to here: it seems to me rather more correct to become studious souls who want to capture every atom of this absolute gem full of uniqueness to be found, between sacrifices and thorns on the head of our heart, never afflicted but pulsating with stars containing secrets in the process of emerging.

Adolphe, David, Echo and Loren are the emissaries, the ravens of caves in constant eruption, the architects of this wandering that makes our ears tense, feverish and fearful. Their hands, their uvulas, their propensities are a daring, a defiance, a concept, a war weave that leads us to the truth that in its uncomfortableness embellishes us with pathos that greases our skin and our thoughts. 

Travellers of time and unknowns, the Chants Of Maldoror seem to be millenary spirits with an impeccable and extraordinary vitality: despite the quantity of meteors exploded in their hands, the writing is orderly, concentrated, capable of a macabre but astonishing smile, a miracle in the centre of gravity of their graces, processed, put in order and exposed like explosions in the core of continuous metamorphoses.

Having started out as emissaries of the Middle Ages, intent on knowing the rituals that horrify most people, these young people who are already adults shift their intentions and plunge into an artistic will that only apparently appears more ‘comfortable’: in reality they become even more devastating, tremendous knights of battles and clashes with the motions of the soul, rebellious scholars, indifferent to their surroundings, splendid concentrates of whims and obstinacy to which we find it easy to be obedient, to transfer knowledge into the process of experience.

A decadence that turns into a place where resignation, limpid, knows impetus, and frustration manages to turn into a marvellous joy that is more atypical than ever. 

The show knows rules, circumspection, suffocating turmoil, states of perdition, within a plot that is never confusing but only becomes untenable for the ignorant and the deliberately superficial-minded. Bullets, brambles, prayers with no gods to reach, bows and devotions with complex languages: this is the gift offered by the four without requiring sacrifices but pointing out, in each composition, that listening can generate promiscuity and abandonment of wills, in a rapture that does not leave one defeated.

Sound, a metal blade from the skin made sour by impenitent pains, is the king of it all, the main master, the anticipation of every slope that will be experienced through sequences of chords and rhythms that create a continuous roar and descent, to oxygenate the centre of the earth. The crooning, the recitative of the voice, the tones that are tangles of blood with books in hand, are the prerogative of Adolphe, priest of the dark, irrepressible scholar, actor and director of an inner theatre that makes one tremble. His most obvious quality is to make his voice the scourge of travelling souls, an intuitive pupil devoid, however, of ties with those who have gone before him, in order to settle, untamed, on the throne of beauty.

Loren is an alchemist of melody, an experimenter, a disciple of black beauty, untamed, with an impetus full of salt and mixtures, like a druid who studies the elements of nature and transfers them to his six strings.

Echo is a sound bubble that stretches across the black and white keys of a synth and a piano, to regulate the temperature of pain and create emotional planes where everything is adjacency, a pact of structures that marry with other musical forms, to give the whole sacredness.

David is the governor of instincts, the gatekeeper who opens up the noise of the earth and brings it inside the evil mechanisms of Loren and Echo, a trapeze player of his instrument, which to call bass is totally reductive. It is up to him to manoeuvre the moods, to pilot the emotional beams inside the belly, to stabilise the magnetic waves of a band that seems to be an eighteenth-century orchestra, devoid of inhibitions.

What is most astonishing about COM's music is that one finds oneself in front of brushstrokes of sound on the canvas of life, for an art that seems different from music, like a misunderstanding that nevertheless unites different entities. A creative process that compartmentalises knowledge in relation to styles that have been stiffened by adoration, in which the critical process is lacking. The four, on the other hand, do not make Death Rock or Gothic Rock, but rather moisten knowledge with paintings that disintegrate all convictions, rebels armed with the intelligence to be unwilling fragments of the ministry of those two musical genres.  Disobedient and anarchic, the boys enter the labyrinth of all tensions to destabilise years and years of conventions that they know make them useless. There is a pleasant arrogance on their part: not to be subjects, but unwitting rulers...

It is a wonder, and not a little wonder, that one cannot waste time searching for stylistic and cultural references with this group, as what stands out is a personal torture before the known, continually escaping in order to elevate knowledge in a field where novelty can be achieved.

I prefer to imagine this combo within a cultural space that starts from the origin of spirits, of impulses that elevate mankind, passing through the Middle Ages, to move to the heavens, in a jubilation of senses that expand a disease-like necessity that they live with positivity, worthy of the kiss of death that observes them smugly. They create a carpet of putrid encumbrances, appointments with chains and mental arthrosis, in the idyll of a grin that from evil becomes digestible.

Crossing abysses, they fix thoughts inside a mental crucifix in which everything is bowed and astonished, to release hypnosis and magnitudes in a constant way.

Let us gather, suspicious and trembling, around these seven candelabra, to put in writing, before worshipping them, our fears...

Song by Song

1 - Reunion and Death

‘I sink the knife in the mother's heart

and the capes grow scarlet from violet’.

Metallic cavities, vapours and fatuous fires enter the queue of an emotional funeral with Adolphe's recitative reigning over the sonic sparks pregnant with hallucinations from San Francisco Bay.

Much more than a theatre of sorrow: here, right from the start, one finds oneself catapulted into the din of an abandonment where the bewilderment is provided by acid guitars, with nuclear impetus.

2 - Feast In Black (Mortualia)

‘My soul is in shards, in and out of the way spot of my skull’.

The struggle of the denizens of hell becomes an inevitable sacrifice, and the voice, seemingly distant so as not to be reached, declaims inhospitable verses, death in its manifest triumph of the moment of the funeral allows the music to be ethereal but rebellious, with Echo's synth giving the idea of gloomy and melancholic paintings and the bass scanning every fear...

3 - Post Mortem

‘Restless shapes are dancing on the blade of my knife’

Imagine, on a lightning-filled night, the Virgin Prunes dining with Bauhaus, amidst bickering and impertinent laughter, in swinging adoration of violent gestures commanded by the COMs with great intelligence. Gloomy, grim, excruciating display of auditory discomfort in the rustle of bees working to cleanse the unknown within fear. Lancinating parade of sounds gluing to the slimy glass of swelling consciences....

4 - Resurrection

‘Resurrection is real death!’

One goes to Frankfurt, to knock on the door of Varney Cantodea's house, to see her dancing happily, to this composition that comes from the 18th century, while, after a bath of modernity, she sacrifices herself in a short but effective movement. Religion is challenged, reduced to an avoidable misery, space is made for the perennially denied millenary truth and the obvious finds the manifest light of the heavenly vault. Redundant without distortion, the song is the miracle of Gothic seduction at its finest...

5 - Baptism Until The Angel

‘Doesn't appear the lost image of the end’

Neurotic tremors, blades on Loren's neck, weed in the voice of Adolphe, here a black magician of death, a messenger with studs in his heart, as he launches himself into the grooves of the bass and drum machine, with the guitar investigating and creating pertuosities...

6 - Red Communion

‘With Angels crucified on red roses in bloom’.

The scenery changes, we find ourselves in a church hypnotised by Echo, an advancing teacher and painter: after a few seconds the track becomes a sensory hallucination in the presence of paranoia, to capture human sleep and catapult it into the abyss of time. Martial, dark, unrepentant and evil, the composition minimises melody and harmony to be chaos and paralysing genuflection...  

7 - Requiem Aeternum

On the eternal rest the band dissolves a cloud of sound that fogs the hearing and plunges us into despondency, in a rhythm that nails while the voice makes the skin crawl and the mind wanders lost in the limbo of the unknown. Sounds like cold corpses, where only the bass at the end seems to remind us that we are listening to something ‘human’.

A surprising farewell that fixes the band's value where no one will expect it, because those who precede live the grief of incomprehension...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

12th May 2024

 

Links song by song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlxCiH0yDMU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ps7VmXJjy4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA4O1Za6bVQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDyevx7xIWI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzBUMKnk63c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o6_mB18E2M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt-r54BtZ1o

My Review: Joy Division - Closer

 Joy Division - Closer

‘The greatest pain in the world is that which, drop by drop, pierces the soul and breaks it.’

Francisco Villaespesa

In human history, there are ties that are passed on without direct contact, like a trajectory that swings covertly. In this case we are talking about the Odyssey, the transplant of the most extreme adventures that, in March 1980, in just thirteen days, decided to enter the musical body of a project full of symptoms adjacent to the original, a catastrophic and hallucinatory journey, gliding into the cold clearing of Britannia Low studios, in Islington, London, to deliver us not an idyll but the metre that measures the difference between good and the most extreme ills.

There are 41 kilometres between Salford and Macclesfield, and the four boys shared this distance by travelling to Manchester, the grey dome of existence at its murkiest and most turbulent. The fun lay in escaping reality, creating imaginative islands within an electric circuit of musical notes and extreme paradoxes. The culture of the city was leaving the idleness of the early sixties and in the middle of the seventies was pushing to gain sympathy, favour and star approval. Joy Division were the most obvious break, but they were never thwarted: the Buzzcocks saw their black beauty and welcomed them for a tour during which JD wrote the nine songs that gave Unknown Pleasures a sad record, still alive today, of making a new album that belied much of that attitude but lacked quality.  Closer is a reasoned, devilish, magnetic scream, a magmatic wave of fatigue, introspection, a black-and-white fever that lingers on, without hesitation. It collects the detritus of a soul in disarray, the enthusiastic pulsing of the other three members, young people full of vitamins and hopes, delightful slackers in search of a status that will take them away from this urban agglomeration increasingly at odds with everyday life. The texts, in fact, are a daily diary in which thoughts are not assumed to be artistic manifestations disjointed from reality, but are instead the cast, the imprint, the attitudinal snapshot of a will that is specified in the affirmation of weakness as the limit that cannot be beaten. Nine compositions divided into two sides: the first gravitates within the systematic intention to show inaccessibility, the unpleasant that requires freezing while still managing to make the soul sweat. The second is a mass of thoughts in total decay that are accompanied by gloomy, lapidary music, full of rain and wind, to carry away, in posthumous memory, an absence of energy that resembles a song without the magnets of despair.

Right from the cover, where the religious significance is eliminated (only an arm of the Madonna appears and Jesus of Nazareth is almost totally hidden), we understand that we are before an image that does not summarise the content but rather indicates the departure, the intention, the extreme beauty and intensity of the fascination with death, shown here in the act of proximity, of welcoming, of shedding tears. But JD's second work is not a synthesis of grief, not even a heaven that through exaltation can lead to devotion. It is an account with the scales on one palm and the bewildered gaze on the other, in a dynamic play of forces that can make you lose your co-ordinates. Closer is a roar in the form of a toy with dried cheeks through a surgical Post-Punk that contemplates the assumption of new expressive methodologies. Here, then, in the grooves appear, ‘softly’, the itches of a frightened Coldwave, the first vows of that Darkwave that will take its rightful share of responsibility immediately after the release of this jewel.   There is no shortage of elaborate psychedelia and a propensity to give noise a validity that in industrial music could also cause annoyance. The record, by means of Martin Hannett's cursed ability to achieve that perfection not appreciated by the four of them, mummifies emotion (the spontaneous kind) to generate a mental short circuit in which bewilderment, fear and tension make it all seem like the fruit of a film projection, allowing the horror and the dramatic to coexist, not forced.

Too much has been said about Ian Curtis's suicide, about the will and so much other gratuitous naivety and nonsense: instead, we find ourselves in the territory of unbalanced expressions, ungovernable impulses, joy and sorrow as an inescapable fetter, with the ability to provoke thoughts full of constantly falling blood magnets. Ian talks about himself and does so in front of a microphone: no will knows this dynamic...

We are supposed to think how for once the music was disinterested in the lyrics and that only a magical conjunction could make one believe in a connection between the two. But Bernard, Peter and Stephen at that time did not even listen to the singing of the poor boy divided and atrophied by spasms. After forty-four years it can be argued that this was a good thing, a mind-boggling coincidence. 

The themes addressed in the record are spectral circumnavigations, with fatigue glued to the lack of all hope, a polishing of death by extinguishing life, depositing dreams in the vault where all interest could not mature. Erect, weedy, electric and powerful, a slow anvil with accelerations that precede the long procession leading into the zone of silence that can deliver the truth. The tracks are united only by the fact that the musicians and the vocals are perfectly recognisable: for the rest, it is an avalanche that disrupts every harmony and the delicacy dies second by second, snuffing out dreams and ambitions to conquer a hermitage called Masterpiece, the one that makes no one happy, the saddest one imaginable…  Everything in this modern getsemani is heading towards unpleasantness and the impending clash between the desire to hear how it goes and the absolute will to turn off every transistor.

And there are still people who call this work ‘dark’...

The delicate glass of this latest creation is nothing more than a circus where the clown does not come out, he shows his trick through Chinese shadows, and the horses, the usually untamed ones, here sit and have their manes combed by the frozen tears of Ian, the unintended protagonist of a lacerating solo, verse after verse. The atmosphere, leaden and vibrant, often leads to annoyance, to the reaction of souls who would like to deny the true identity of a stomach-churning listen. Rituals, ideals, dispersions, clashes, from Punk's ‘No Future’ to ‘I'm fucked’: it seems like so many years have passed, but no, with this jewel Joy Division show how any impetus can lose its fury and find the slime of increasingly conscious and capable friction. It is shocking that the band forgets the poetry of methodical Post-Punk, made up of literary references from the late 19th century, to become the outpost of a series of furious introspective analyses: perhaps this is precisely why the genre definition for Closer loses its value, as we are catapulted onto a couch discovering that a psychiatrist struggles to gather information.  It happens with words as with music: the song form, only apparently, helps to believe that madness is not a spring that takes life and makes it bounce neatly. It is exactly the opposite and this is where the difficult management of arthrosis, arthritis and degenerations that seem to fall into the lake of discontent begins. 

One has to identify the zones of belonging, those of rejection, those in which the band clashes with itself, with the producer, with time, which does not seem able to accept that these children do not watch over the real, but instead decide to position themselves on the tail end of time to say goodbye. Everything dies in these nine songs, no hypothesis of copy and paste, of a reproduction or a continuation, because the true masterpiece is the one in which its own sense, its own space, in the mysterious location that makes no one comfortable, is an unattainable archive even for the future.

Closer, from the initial sensory earthquake, becomes a galaxy in continuous explosion, amidst tribal rhythms, boiling genetic circles and the demagnetisation of all trust. One cannot and should not like this set of tensions, but they must be swollen teachers with dubious diopters because, perhaps, the first gain of this work is precisely to give sight as little importance as possible. And so it is that the auditory apparatus finds itself succumbing, unable to cope with these non-songs, these disharmonies, out-of-tune, anxieties, apprehensions and cadaverous sounds that bury every smile.

It has a temporal collocation discoloured by the lack of knowledge and memory on the part of those who did not know those years, lived them, desired them: many albums from 1980 are lysed, punctured, thinned blankets, and if this one has resisted it is only apparently because of a link with the tragedy.

Now it is time to descend into the aisles of these compositions to give awareness a decisive uppercut, for nothing is granted to the listener but to have a nearby void into which to throw oneself...

Song by Song

1 - Atrocity Exhibition

With a tribal beginning from which the Cure would take a lot, we enter the zone of non-melody, of a continuous psychedelic infiltration that is counterbalanced by Ian's singing, the only one capable of painting a subtle harmonic line. But it is a riot of sounds, sabre-rattling, with the bass that seems to join the funk to slow down the acid vein of Bernard's guitar approach, while Stephen puts ice in the veins for an unintended homogeneity with the singer's words. A nerve-wracking, lengthy beginning that immediately makes things clear: Closer will not be the party of well-combed senses...

2 - Isolation

Unknown Pleasures appears only for the neurosis-filled bass and drumming, for the rest we feel the presence of a synth that throws the band into a new zone and perspective: preceding the temple of music with an exaggerated display of mute expressions in circumspect display. It seems to put doses of cheerfulness in that keyboard but, instead, the song is a splendid contortion, in the precipice of a loneliness that advances and demands attention. It dances like robots on loan from Suicide, rather highlighting the boundaries of a rock in the process of excursion.

3 - Passover

The autonomy of intention, when impregnated by blackish certainties, is supported by hinted and sharp guitars, an almost hidden bass, a simple but military drumming, until an evolution is discovered that will generate, in Bernard's arpeggio, a new musical genre of which The Sisters Of Mercy will be the first disciples. Ian is a calculating diviner, ruthless, surgical, never impulsive, he holds back the catastrophe of the verses in a singing that only seems to be devoid of all emotion. A song that shows the creaking of the soul and a capacity of the music for constant alarms, the unwillingness to find a moment when the song can know different heights. Mysterious, diluting in each of its movements the desire to live...

4 - Colony

The glam attack, then off, after a few seconds, into the territories of Killing Joke, where the nervousness passes through the cables, the rolls and oscillations of an epileptic guitar...

Roaring, exhausting, a progression of cuts on the skin and the feeling of a gem that wants to hide...

5 - A Means to an End

The future only knows itself after death: this ballistic miracle sweeps away the history of Post-Punk, of all preemptive doctrine, to open stupor and stiffen nerves. It invites the dance to remain tied up like a mental prostitute, to generate delirium and various illusions. The first moment of a skeletal construction of future New Order appears as a decaying rainbow, measuring things, impulses, relying on a guitar that seems to be a child of the Banshees' Scream album. But Hook's bass is the real mantra, the one that hypnotises before Ian's baritone singing seizes our souls for eternity....

6 - Heart and Soul

A life, excesses, extremes, magnets, turmoil and obedience to a destiny to be hastily written absorb the entire composition with an almost sweet, perfectly tuned, almost powerful, utterly devastating singing, within an architecture that does not linger but finds the method to structure everything in a few movements until giving, in the finale, the impression of a voluntary abandonment to itself. Everything is hinted at, measured, skeletonised, cooled, placed in the cellar of decisions that wear out the nerves, annihilating them...

7 - Twenty Four Hours

The manifesto and apotheosis of a twisting of muscles finds the Post-Punk drive within bacilli and viruses that make listening a free-falling sky, without footholds. Magnetic, dark, devastating, it entrusts the musical trio with the task of drawing tears, while it is up to Ian to illuminate the existential disaster, in an epilogue that shatters every dream. The voice, cleverly illuminated by the obscene dust of an arctic village, renders all joy useless, with the embarrassment of a listening that could, alone, break every breath...

8 - The Eternal

Martin Hannett writes his epitaph with the Manchester band, lending his class to a song that is nothing more than a procession measured by the minimalism of a piano that touches the tears bringing them inside Ian's words, to give this stage the smell of intellectual and physical rubble, in a floral abandon that enchants though paralyses. We enter the intimate, the normally inaccessible places of a soul in quarrel with itself, where the evident fracture is mirrored in the theatricality of dark, greedy atmospheres. Music dies through a gloomy spectre bouncing in the drizzling voice that annihilates weeping. Nothing like it had ever appeared before and it will not find the future sighing for a sequel: the track is a procession that goes beyond definitions as it is embedded in a cloud that dissolves second by second...

9 - Decades

The last petal is synthetic, a keyboard that seems to come out of a black-and-white video game, a progressive and lacerating consumption of all vitality enters the graveyard of dreams to synchronise youth with the old age of every will, in the exhausting decadence of an existence that erases every snap. A keyboard solo leads Ian to pose a question that puts absence on the throne, head down, in a space where every breath into the microphone becomes a syncopated cry that does nothing but pronounce an obligatory sentence, leaving the heart in its damnation. Dry, like an acrylic palette without pulses, the song enhances the mood of the album and embraces the band in its farewell: there is no goodbye when history has decided that this work will be unique for posterity, with the imposition that nothing will have to resemble it...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

9th May 2024

My Review: Sinéad O’Connor - The Lion and the Cobra

 

Sinéad O’Connor - Lion and the Cobra

In a world that seeks perfection, masterpieces, guaranteed amazement without having to make an effort, I would prefer to say that at least in music one should take a humble approach, ending up even feeling embarrassed at not knowing how to handle beauty and depth, diversity and the inner climate created.

Then there are the moments when it becomes upheaval, torment, avalanches of freewheeling questions, landslides of the senses with the security of creating and experiencing an earthly bond, ready to become eternal. And when the notes, the words, the voices, the instruments make us experience all this, we become intimate, complicit, grateful, effervescent, seagulls in flight without a perimeter in the sky.

In 1987 an album was released that was capable of doing this, a door slammed in your face, with splendid pains colouring the walls of your heart with asbestos, with an energy that has never known exhaustion because perfection exists only in the way it rides time without going astray: Lion and the Cobra does this very well, like an eternal kiss from Apollo, God of music and art, who gave her approval to make this record the soundtrack to the days of a parallel paradise, which is specified in the possibility of giving space to torments, follies, exaggerations, multiple streams of propulsive consciousness.

These songs are dowsing arrows that seek to enter the listener's heart, without the need to find concord, but rather a new place to experience the effects caused by these nine different new drugs, in an afternoon that forgets itself and experiences effects: in the heart of the Old Scribe they still last today, thirty-nine years later. 

Like a boat that rents out the history of an entire country and takes it on a voyage to faces that speak different languages, so does this work, a thunderous and deadly debut, an absurdity that creates devices for a chewing that will never give total joy, because this is not necessary: Sinéad does not heal wounds, she causes them in a delightful way, she shows us our naive, unconscious motions while we sleep and she takes care to wake us up, with tactics and planning that succeed in the objective.

She battles with herself, with demons, angels, real and fictitious characters, in an extraordinary crescendo for the craftsmanship of the writing and interpretation, within a truly vast apparatus, which bypasses the genes of musical genres and tunes into experimentation, with the resumption of attitudinal concepts from the past, shaking everything in the centre of her belly, the place of departure and distribution of her enormous sensitivity. Nothing is left to hypothesis, to calculation, everything is instead recorded to be put into the wind, the only way to ensure the possibility of a journey that can touch consciences. Her young age, at the time of writing the songs, did not prevent her from showing strength, compact ideas, multiple qualities, of succeeding in defining the missing, what in 1987, unconsciously, was expected, and this is precisely the greatest capacity: to give what one does not yet know one desires

A fairy disguised as a witch, fairy tales as the nightmare for crime news, psychological analysis that rush into memory, multiple extravaganzas capable of settling in the conscious, the unconscious that is stimulated to take a path: it is only the beginning, an infinitesimal part of what happens while what pulses, in listening, becomes a root, capable of descending into the depths, rebelling against conventions, using the direct language of sincerity, increasingly unbecoming for those who like to hide. She finds this mass and turns it upside down, with songs: what wonderful power is this?

We find the pelvic romanticism of an Ireland that knows how to escape the wear and tear of time, to remain unscathed and to be able to tell the stories that are passed down in a splendid habit, to accompany the days inside a green labyrinth, always fresh, bombastic, rotating, on a perpetual patrol, and does so through a folk sensibility that kisses rock, with sprinkles of electronics, contemplating petals of world music scattered under the skin, not renouncing to make people dance, with a head that is a smiling beehive, in search of space, creating and defining it. Adolescence, in the record, is a true, purposeful vibration, which settles well in the directions that continually move dreams and reality, always a metre further ahead. 

She shouts, she whispers, she barks at the pentagram, she twists in her motions, she never lingers, she does not limp, she walks on notes as if in her DNA this was not a date but her home, always. Moving with ease, she dispenses pills of wisdom, contemplates a rebellion of the senses, overwhelms boredom with her freshness and colours the mind with many-feathered claws: she scratches and knocks our established habits out of our skin.

A prophetic, poetic, melancholic record, never wait-and-see, never willing to waste time and, with great humility, capable of showing cultural plans in search of a landing place, of new departures that with these tracks become obligatory. She does not allow indifference with this album, she drags us into the abyss by deceiving falsehood with her total sincerity. She disarms, putting flowers, ideas, strips of rebellion in the arms of our minds to contemplate, like a homework assignment never to be denied.

Lioness, cobra, but also chameleon, reindeer, cat, gazelle, golden eagle, dolphin, brown bear, ferret, in an endless list that shows the many souls walking among the verses, the ever-visible characters that fill the mental terrain full of grips, in a framework that defines the human jungle as the list goes on, making exchange with the animal world possible. And then there are mobile spirits, pressing in, authoritatively engaging, a reservoir of thoughts ready to spring to its feet. 

And then her, the voice, a continuous miracle, a vibrant cascade of drops between the sweet and the bitter, which, injecting unquestionable technical skills, mould themselves in an extraordinary way in her feeling, in her outlining of words with continuous thrusts, in fascinating, touching ups and downs, ending up embellishing our mediocrity. A promenade, a procession of quality that knows no weakness, vivid, fulminating, sensual, an earthquake that shakes the eardrums and makes them useful in understanding that beyond the form there is an indisputable substance.

When she screams, groans, she seems to show us her childbirth at the moment when she can no longer hold back the body she has had inside her for a lifetime: a continuous birth, with sweat resting on her vocal cords trained to sweep away indifference and nourish astonishment.

Her nature is overflowing, she advances, she seizes, she blesses, she asks for help, she turns her back on stupidity, she confronts cruelty, she plunges her devotion into the love that has wounded her and she, like a wise angel, knows how to transform it, how to erect it on a meritocratic plane. 

She sows, she ignites, she pulverises, she waits, she shows disenchantment and mistrust, she nurtures doubts, and she gets on the chariot of commitment by tackling urgent issues, she paralyses the useless and becomes Goddess without fear, christening winged experiments to teach us new flights. 

It sounds, this incredible debut, like a classic that attaches itself to modernity, often announcing a future that will not be long in coming, in order to converse (dutifully not always in a positive way) with a reality that does not realise that it is also the task of art to act as a metronome, a pointer, an advisor, a paperwork, so as not to waste time. The personal dissatisfaction of her first recordings allowed her to take total control, like a necessary anti-democratic flux: cunning, skill, a furious temperament, the shrewdness of a gauge to measure tensions, spasms and sweetnesses always lurking, in search of a timbre that would make all opposition crumble. It was a battle for her that time but she won it, she took the songs and nailed them, along with those who did not understand them, in the part where victory always has a fiercely satisfied grin. 

And when the voice visualises the images, with the support of music that overrides any reluctance, we find ourselves enveloped in a mantle full of slippery moss, like the result of a rainy day fast-acting on our beats. When she sings the caves feel dismay: she has uncovered them and plunged electric wires into them, disrupting the walls. Often rejecting traditions that she deems superfluous, she puts slush into her thoughts like soft balls of wool, but one gets the impression that the explosions of Nagasaki and Hiroshima are always present in her. Tranquillity absolutely does not live in her head, which sprouts and scatters neuroses without fear of contradiction.

Her passion for music becomes an electric chair. She kills what pop uses to embellish a ridiculous and superfluous space, and drags it into the exercise of songs built with arrangements that alone would displace the most narcissistic of artists, shining the methodology of a polyvalent writing, attached to the expression that must contain discipline and rules. A punk that does not use punk to oppose but rather imagination, research: the middle finger creeps in the bitter waves of continual travails, with an anger that does not become an outlet but a clod of earth in the sky.

She is a godmother to Lisa Germano, Fiona Apple, Pj Harvey, Tracy Chapman, Liz Phair, Dolores O'Riordan: she teaches them all something, because it is undeniable that Sinéad's freedom has paid a very high personal price, and an imprint capable of spreading in the consciences of these singers, beyond musical styles. The Irish artist has brought as a gift qualities that have compacted in the macroscope of others' consideration, becoming a peasant woman who has sown her seeds in the territories of others.

If we start from the title, from the cover, we are immediately catapulted into history, into religion, into modernity in glittering colours, finding on the way wars, hatred, twisted fairy tales, explosive mixtures of layered consciousnesses, with allegories, phosphorescent images, settings that make convictions creak, attacks on politics in the hands of politicians and not citizens, sentimental relationships where terror and lies do not stop making people shed tears, with the incredible surprise of seeing her handle it all with grace and respect. Far from a masterpiece: here she has gone further, where there are no right words to specify and assert. One can only say Thank you and continually bow one's head to learn, without getting distracted... 

And now we mourn for this record, not for its demise: in this album lies its immortality, which could, as a consequence, also be ours...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

25th April 2024