My Review: Sacred Legion - The Silent Lineage

Sacred Legion - The Silent Lineage

"I was a child, that is, one of those monsters that adults fabricate with their regrets"

Jean-Paul Sartre

A corsair race, the funny ways of a past that flirts with wounds catapults itself into the neurasthenic tangle of lipstick music, perfectly fixed to the mystery that accounts for itself, in the deafening impermeability that fractures expectations and pretensions.

From the province of Frosinone, three adult figures work at the lathe, encircling the flanks of the clichés that would always like to be certain that every definition cannot be incorrect. And so the poor fantasy in power speaks of 'Death-Rock, Dark-Wave, Post-Punk', as the impetus of a vulgar approach.   But the band from Ciociaria does not have in its repertoire the need to travel with an identity defined by others: the terrain of manoeuvre is absolutely marked by a freedom that is obligatorily limited because it is necessary to describe human drifts, where consolation and culture, of literary derivation, favour more precise boundaries. The sacred temporal space governs the liturgical spasms of compositions that make every vicious circle surrender. They are far removed from those reference groups with which Fabiano, Mirko and Tony's band are associated. The album is a hundred-metre runner's sprint (given the brevity of its twenty-four minutes), but it lives with the propensity of the marathon runner, since listening, the carefully repeated one, shows the crossing of history, with geography constructing physical features, to the point of giving faces a light that reveals complexity. All eight songs foreshadow a future to be marked in their intellectual paths.  The three aim their refined stylistic abundance to encircle reality, curbing the stylistic hangover of different musical genres. It is orgasmic anticipation, it is the precipice of a refined abrasive combo, with guitars battering the vessel of impulses born in research. Fabiano articulates thoughts with luculent impetus, scraping away banality.

The sounds curate the overkill, unravelling in the school of a mode that favours a strange form of 'catchiness': some refrains seem to favour the expression of 'gothic pop in search of imprecise smears', a mode that can bring even those less accustomed to these climatic and sensory inclinations closer to these lyrics that probe and bring to light a ravenous need to freeze truths.

Five words are repeated twice, generating a planimetry of mental addresses.

Heart - Eyes - Life - Back - Dream.

Here they are, these mammoth queens, piloting a precise order of intentions in the chaos of a slight cut-up.

The music does not perform panegyrics, it could not: it reveals, represents, seduces, hammers, scratches, connects the mood and smells of that writing with which it dialogues, fights, establishes blood pacts. Tony's querulous bass guitar manages to bring the auditory apparatus closer to the hammering with big breath. Mirko's drums are sly, using impervious, stubborn hand tones, where imaginative counter-rhythms, stop-and-go and probing percussions establish the effervescence of a whole that seems to escape itself. Then there is the considerable amount of space that the musicians allow themselves, the pauses, the entrances and exits that act as glue to the intentions. 

The Silent Lineage does not follow the pilgrimage of widowed bands of the past, nor does it go back to rummaging through the stars and rubbish, nor does it leap into the future like a drunken kangaroo. It defines immediacy, it documents, knowing full well that fools seek out references, preventing them from identifying truth and reality.  And it is here that the band shows its loyalty, its ability to fall into the restrictive funnel of musical genres, preferring to adopt the sweat, the silence, the chaos that unites souls in the ravenous territories of rehearsal sessions. We witness, therefore, the release of the seed of their greatness, that uniqueness that links research and sodomises indifference. 

The brevity of the compositions offers the possibility of better historicising the scratches, the bumps, the bows to dreams, fraudulent, lukewarm, diving into life with little breath.

They play, they paint, they mess around with history by addressing themselves to a restrictive mode: they do not need redundancies, bumpy effects to nullify feelings. Here, I would emphasise that the compactness stems from erasing the assumption that their music is a sonic promenade, like clothes in search of applause.

Absolutely not: whoever listens to these eight songs sees a few rays, but in their power the truth is grasped and exposed to torture, which is magic (not white, let alone black), allowing the artistic apparatus to be a precise prophylaxis of a search that cures pain.  When what is experienced is without instructions, disorientation becomes the most sublime joy: getting lost becomes a resource and Sacred Legion know how to regroup the senses, in the disharmonic and marvellous nocturnal wanderings, with subtle but powerful insights. The album interrogates, it exhorts, it does not pretend, it offers shamanic propensities to the rejection of history in its manifest violence and, to better index the listening, it structures the music around seasons that, as they mix, fall, become unrecognisable. Winter is the season of these perceptions. Let us now follow their footprints and thorns, one by one...

Song by Song

1 - Flower Phantoms 

The entrance of this volcanic process is slow (the song with the longest minute count), like a strategic nuclear move, it enchants with a guitar arpeggio and a martial march of the drums, to obsequious sound in the tinkles that surround the perceptions. Then, like a scimitar slipping through the veins, the acceleration is witnessed and it is a leap into the belly. The seeds are sown, in the refrain, of a modality that envisages two voices in the song, as if to swell the listening for a better reception. Pillar, lead, indicative of a direction that will expand its energetic propensity for scorching sounds.

2 - Back to Nowhere

The three become privateers, the guitar and bass marry the electric dance, with the rhythmic carpet reducing the snares and offering powerful, dry beats. These are epidermal scratches that create a collision, shattering cognitive space, returning, in the end, to a place capable of dispersing every cardinal point.

3 - Purify

The melodic, initial search presents an approach to courtesy, to the ease of those who suffer this kind of sonic propensity. But the band refuses to be simplistic and tosses off the beginning in the swirl of ravenous, wounded sounds as they lose gravity. Right here, in these few seconds, the drumming twists the steps of the rhythm and becomes the sovereign ruler over the guitar and bass. The singing knows discretion, diving into the misfortune with elegance, without screaming, following the lead of the words...

4 - Dig Me No Grave

Centimetres and metres of glam rock precede the progression, allow the bass to pine away in an epic distortion and then away, as in a day of pain without a thermometer, into the exponential confines of an ankle-hammering horror rock.

5 - A Taste of Turmoil

Gravity slips, the track becomes a post-mortem recital, an ordeal of jolts, bringing to mind the graffiti of Killing Joke's second album and the first vague sounds of Southern Death Cult, but nothing settles in those heavy boulders and, as a forced choice, the three sailors decide to invent sound waves that lead them into the earth's subsoil: speed, which seems to be the pilot of this shipwreck, is actually given by the writing of a lyric full of radioactive miracles.

6 - Black Sun Ritual

Echoes of CCCP's Punk Islam open the dances, putting distance between them and the Emilian band. Everything becomes mystery, the blood comes out, the slowness, the sonic crescendo establishes a strategic plan: everything must arrive like a hypothesis and become precise like a form of prayer. A hiss pilots the impetuous action and the sonic rarefaction descends to meet the bass that uncovers the past of this sonic rush. Instead of the guitar, it is Tony's instrument that is grating. As a challenge, to be decisive, the song offers ample musical challenges, with Fabiano's vocals disappearing towards the end, as if sucked into a strange, mephistophelian ritual.

7 - Hole In The Heart

The bang above the sky of Frosinone: with the attitude of a hard-core cluster of inches, the track presents the coexistence of ardour and rejection, with the sounds perfectly circumscribing the words. In the stylistic search, note how the track suspends itself, returning to the scratch of the initial harmonic turn to accommodate a brilliant female voice that disorients and conquers.

8 - Shards

We come to the end of this cursed fresco in a state of grace with the song offering its sides to various, probable and obvious juxtapositions, but Old Scribe rejects them. The three do not seek originality, peaks from which to look down on any defeated colleagues. Instead, they throw themselves into the lava labyrinth to leave a trail of hissing roughness, to stun, certainly not to bewitch, thus giving the composition a brilliance that distinguishes it from the others. It experiments, seizes the chance of a becoming and writes the future of this band that made its debut by making the night tremble...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

6th March 2024

https://batcaveproductions.bandcamp.com/album/the-silent-lineage

My Review: The Churchhill Garden - Dreamless

 The Churchhill Garden - Dreamless

Even angels ask for help, they spill the beans, they reach out their hand, they grasp at the don't-know-what in order to find the light again. And if to do so are two artists always in a state of grace, who would never make us think of a moment of trouble, here we receive a surprising news: it all happens in the notes of this song with pyjamas, a slow meteor seeking re-entry into the heavenly atmosphere, into life, into the earthly condition. These are thoughts slipping through the hands of Andy Jossi, increasingly focused on traversing the spaces with his delicate but tension-filled atmospheres, made obedient by his irrefutable talent. And in the words and voice of Krissy Vanderwoude, here more than ever a sad-faced fairy, gathered in her cloud, searching for the right ray. Stunning track, a concentrate of the Swiss-American duo's trademark, capable of revealing how true friendship becomes the environment for a complicit writing, adherent to reality, leaving it all to the doom of these almost six minutes, in which what happens is a cry tamed by guitars in alternative mode first, dream pop then, and finally shoegaze, to circulate in the swamp of a text that seems to be devoid of oxygen and that is interpreted by the Chicago singer with a transport that does not give up delicacy, but that this time includes drops of bitter tears. Without dreams one could plunge, musically speaking, into a sonic ruckus, anger, or stop playing at all. Instead.
Instead we listen to whispers that take in specific moments of the last thirty years, collected as inspiration by Andy who then, in his room full of shining artifices, sews on the neck of his guitar a melodic pattern that once again has his own style, highly recognizable. For her part, Krissy works as always with the play of double voices, with her angelic breath that this time has low but powerful eyes, with the dutiful zest that comes out to bring to fruition her need: to find dreams and make them walk in her heart. Both music and lyrics visit, with class and lightness, hell: in the tangle of liquid-filled notes ascending to heaven, the words descend in an inquiry that finds truth. The drum machine opens the slow dance, then it is the guitars that are accompanied by a delicate keyboard and, ever so gently, we come to the refrain that shakes with its lightness, as if it were a drop of frost in front of the entrance of pain. As soon as it is over, Andy enters straight as a spindle into a heartbreaking arpeggio and the voice returns, to compact this winter poem into the centre of our listening.
We weep as we embrace this pair of artists and leave sweaty but convinced that sometimes art performs miracles.We all come together to toast this sincere, humble song that will make our listening a heavenly blessing...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

8th December 2023

https://thechurchhillgarden.bandcamp.com/track/dreamless

My Review: The Slow Readers Club with Joe Duddell & No. 7 Ensemble - Live at Canvas Manchester / 1-12-2023

The Slow Readers Club with Joe Duddell & No. 7 Ensemble
Live at Canvas
Manchester

Can a bubble fill with deliberate, sudden emotions, and then also suspend your breath, wander off in wonder? If you attend the musical event of the year, certainly yes, and that is exactly what happened at the elegant Canvas in Manchester, where a generous miracle took place on stage: the union of different modes, roles and approaches to music, for a result that makes, this time, shock a multiple benefit. The hypnosis touched the shoulders of each of the participants, except for those few people who preferred to chat, paying for it, and even ended up disturbing Aaron. But it is undeniable that the result penetrated sensitive and attentive souls. The songs chosen by the fans and processed by Joe Duddell in a very short time altered the interpretation of the original ones: everything moved to another emotional and sensory plane, with the pleasant feeling of a nocturnal birth within the hearts. Wistfulness, melancholy, sadness, which are often the natural habitat of these compositions, took flight wrapped in a linen scarf, in order to arrive, unharmed, within the moonbeams.
Madness, trembling, tension but never a sense of loss governed the sixteen magic-filled streams to find themselves in a different entrance: an infinite catapult of thrills established that this experience could create with memory an infinite instrument full of strength and vitality. The changes, the retouches, the verve of a conductor truly capable of first intuiting and then bringing it all to an untouchable status makes this evening the representation of unions that are natural parts, and of which one can only hope for a continuous proliferation. The strings, as they did in 2017, push both towards the abdomen and the vault of heaven new consciousnesses, branching out into the paths of thoughts new shimmers. And one is fragile, shrouded in interpretative secrets that enhance individuality, while a few centimetres from one's own person others seem to be filled with similar tremors. On a small stage, eleven people had the ability to bring pop closer to classical music, to annul any distances to enhance the warmth, the colour of the notes and tune the passion within a densely visited circuit, and not by chance. Aaron's voice, much more attentive than last week's, scratched, made tumult known, splitting veins and vertebrae thanks to a deadly intensity: as if he had crouched down in his own intimacy and decided to let it drop into the microphone. Tuned to the gravelly tones of seven musicians perennially in a state of grace, seriousness, and even responsibility, the frontman slid his uvula across the carpet of vibrations so strung together that there was a single lump in his throat for the duration of the concert.

The release to weeping, to yearning was simply impressive and devastating: all the words that we already knew by heart, and that perhaps we had the presumption of having understood, this evening were able to teach us new elements, knocking us to the ground, into chaos, into joy, into the embrace between the black and white of a starry sky inside the Canvas. The drumming this evening, thanks to long pauses, was remarkably effective, perfect, even enhancing the bass, for an ensemble that made the interpretation illuminating: it was like this for every song played together. Then, all of a sudden, Aaron was alone with the ensemble, and it was like taking a warm punch in the chill of the Mancunian night. The slow, dense, phosphorescent energy came out of the amplifiers to kiss our inertia, our stillness, to produce a different crash in our perceptions. The chains, those mentioned in Know The Day Will Come, have fallen on our skin, like a generous liberating act: sometimes in contradictions pacts of infinite wisdom are established... In the new prison, the wings of coveted freedom found themselves resized, teaching, releasing enthusiasm as tears wet the floor. Four of the six songs, which had been released six years ago, after the first contact between the band and the ensemble, were re-proposed but also modified, caressed and kissed by a new idea, through an expressive 'liveliness' that gave them even more of an impression of extended drama.
The lights conveyed the rare ability to connect with the notes: a fact that impressed the Old Scribe, who did not give up closing his eyes to fly, with precision, into a state of absorption that was more necessary than ever. Time seemed like a speleologist launched into the crater of the pieces to bring out fragments of continuous wonder, with amazement running through his veins with no will to stop. The audience, enthusiastic and inebriated, was once again able to legitimise their love and bring it into the space of a memory where they can knock often: evenings like these don't happen often. An experience that also highlights the Manchester band's confidence in letting someone, externally, put a lamp in the belly of these jewels: if perfection exists, it should be sought in others and the four have amply demonstrated this. Struggle, self-denial, the limit and its opposite have established a rain of tears and reflections that have generated paralysis and at the same time a 'strange' joy: words like messages frankly glued to notes that have changed clothes have managed to open wide the range of our antennae, giving us the map of new truths. There was no shortage of smiles: during the performance of Grace of God Aaron fell into hesitation, with the support of the adoring audience, ending in a rhythmic applause that conveyed an incandescent emotion: where there is error, there is also support...

Everything I Own, Sacred Song, Grace of God, Afterlife and All the Idols were the most spectacular moments of the evening, with Block Out The Sun watching from above. But undeniable was the quality of the entire concert, a dense and generous heap that spanned the discography, bringing out even more of its beauty, its strength, its intensity to make precise the sense of devoted belonging to the band. Joe's work is worthy of a Nobel Prize for emotional literature, for handing Aaron the sceptre of an unbridled but respectful angel, and for allowing his boys to leave an incredible tattoo depicting art at its highest level on that stage: history has a date, a direction and an enchantment that will forever make those chains free to be felt as the wings of our best dreams...

Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford, England
2 December 2023

My Review: HUIR - VITAL

 HUIR - VITAL

In the imaginary prairie of constantly moving skills, someone enters from the real world, debuting with an invitation to use the negative aspects of existence, those ones you would most like to avoid. They are two brave pirates from Barcelona (Spain), careful to bring their depth of intentions inside a sound circuit that knows how to mix shadows and light, managing to make us dance, visiting musical genres that seem to be one: a sweet, powerful, cunning miracle, revealing impressive intentions on the part of those who find themselves in front of their first release. Fully integrated in the artistic mode of their label (Cold Transmission Music), this combo seem to have the grace to write a jewel that piques curiosity while, at the same time, immediately unleashing the senses towards a wonderful dark joy. The few notes of the guitar reveal the darkwave approach, the atmosphere seems to visit an electronic temperament with elegant splashes of synth-pop that give fluidity and a strange, peculiar joy, imbued with small claws. Ana Of The Head's vocals and singing is a caress that takes us back to that gothic intimacy of the early 1980s: soft but, with the words coming out of her uvula, she is able to offer chills that shake the soul. For his part, David Solazo is a naval engineer who carries his creature through the night moving waves with great skill. Half-hidden seeds of a melancholic coldwave seem to rise to the sky, especially when the guitar is absent and Ana seems to be left alone: an interesting conjunction of different styles find a way to increase the emotional load of the writing. The production is entrusted to a well-known magician, that Maurizio Baggio who knows perfectly well how to enrich the artists' abilities for a result that is evident: knowing how to be subjugated with infinite class in the hundred and ninety-five seconds of the song, while one has the impression of being inside a mental circuit in the midst of its reflections. The mystery, the light, the rhythm, the intentions aimed at a work of mystical seduction make this song a hopeful embrace towards the EP coming next year. They succeed in their intention to make us enjoy our lives, and they do so by throwing us into the open-air track of an ocean that will bring this flame to illuminate a new part of all of us. Simply succeed in this intention and we can welcome a new, seductive and capable artistic couple.

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford, England

26th November 2023

https://huirbanda.bandcamp.com/track/vital

My Review: JOY/DISASTER - HYPNAGOGY

 

JOY/DISASTER - HYPNAGOGY

My God: how beautiful, how rich...

The wind of shortcomings and approximations is blown away by a cylindrical rose containing eleven emotional explosions that tangle the stomach and sublimate the senses, in a rush where everything is left behind, with the future about to bless this fluorescence full of claws and delicious punches in the face. It all happens thanks to a line-up that has been sowing prowess for some time now, and with their latest work HYPNAGOGIA achieves artistic perfection, without smearing, offering an artistic sampler of enormous dimensions, both in terms of content and form, because in both situations their range is solid and banishes all doubt and uncertainty in those who might be sceptical. Instead, the freshness, the power of the structure, the branches, the liveliness with which black and grey approach the sun of life make one's mouth open wide: there are prodigies that must be supported and this is what must be done. It is eighteenth birthday of the band from Nancy (France), and it must be said that with their coming of age these men, who kiss life with nettles, brambles and blue roses in their mouths, have conquered an enveloping, disorienting maturity, through a churning sea of arrows, with sounds that tell even before the riffs and the succession of chords and melodic textures.
Ever since the rocky debut, back in 2006, with JD, the Old Scribe has seen expressed the talents of a multifaceted, edgy ensemble, capable of slinging itself into the terrain of research in order to govern the throbbing needs that had to emerge. With the subsequent Paranoia everything was clear: the magnet had been deposited forever in our hearts. And then a crescendo with no possibility of stopping.... But let us come to this last gasp, the new work, which will forever remain in the pool of every desire.
What is impressive is the band's deep participation in human delirium without the risk of soiling the soul: the feat is to enter reality and not observe it from afar, making it all believable, for a sensual play of moods, smells, and descriptions of the human psyche that astounds. Inclined to the Post-Punk temperament from the outset, they wear the fluid guise of a Guitar Rock that envelops the rhythm section to enhance, through continuous interlocking, their intuition and desire to complete what a single musical genre does not allow. Here, then, is music that scratches, absorbs, claims listeners through enchanting phrasing, moody vicissitudes, sowing intense manic debris, deconstructing the conviction that everything has already been said. Robust is the opposition on their part, and it is an action accomplished through rhythmic and melodic pounding, which swallows up any reluctance and develops the ocean of reflections that knead to tears. The determination to find a style and erudite our ignorance is a sanguine satellite, devoid of poisons but dense, like a tongue of asphalt. To do this, every single track favours the perfect embrace between thorny melodies and rhythms that show a concrete ability to distance themselves from those who feed comparisons and reminiscences. They discard, with great pride, this risk and trace the musical sky with trajectories full of novelty, without denying a historical framework that has suggested but not determined the mode of expression.
The greatest creator of all this goodness is Nicolas ROHR, an illuminist of pulsional gravity, the French magician who engraves on the staff with a treble clef placed over his heart. And, when the syllables come out of his throat, he rushes into the heart of every nervous tension... Sebastien MASSUL is the pilot of rhythm, with phosphorescent sticks and powerful arms, but melodic when necessary, to give the drums a poetic and robust role. Simon BONNAFOUS is the band's second guitarist, an angel with a cloak full of drops of blood who delivers gentle punches. Soupa RUNDSTADLER is a four-string magnet, capable of making the earth a continuous earthquake, and his blows are lashings that make the skin a continuous shiver. Like an operating theatre in which the surgery consists of extirpating cancer, so the four French artificers pounce on the lifeless body of life to remove tons of dirt: they intervene with a firm, decisive hand, scraping away all the impurities, to restore dignity and relief. These songs are therapeutic, rummaging through human history and projecting their talents into our veins. The singing, in English, is confident, the lyrics well written and the vocal mode is a mirror, precise, of how thoughts and feelings can establish a perfect union.
Everything is supportive, convinced, like a dark marriage that penetrates into the bowels of behaviour: the lyrics are swaggering, direct, they focus on the human experience where fear is not allowed but touches it, succeeding in the feat of coming out on top. Human relationships are full of descriptions in which dreams and promises are a carpet of troubles that they tend to compact towards a liquid dissolution, bringing the truth of all mediocrity before a mirror that sweats and trembles. The energy they produce is a divine gift, which shakes you up but at the same time directs you to make better use of your time, because they have succeeded in teaching a lesson to thousands of bands fossilised on a few, dull, bilious schemes, refreshing all music: don't disperse this mighty miracle. Now it's time to navigate through this seaweed infected with irresistible beauty...


Song by Song

1 - Celebrate

Celebrate, of course we do, the song that opens the album: on an initially slow and melancholic start, the four then manage to stir the spirits and launch, progressively (thanks to a bloody bass), the whole thing into a hypnotic riff and melodic but baritone singing. The lyrics are a functional invective against an interlocutor wasting his kingdom, in the time of change that stifles every dream. The solo is exploding rust and the drumming a shotgun blast...

2 - Fear

A poignant display of a decaying relationship, everything is orchestrated to be a tribal mantra, with a willingness to give indie rock a chance to flirt with post-punk. Tears gathered in the shadows celebrate the courage of a song that exerts a continuous fascination, with the energetic duality of guitars that swaggeringly render these emotions like an eel escaping death...

3 - Nowhere

The ballad that kills the truth: when all that is revealed sinks the enthusiasm. Dramatic lyrics find the right sonic backdrop for a combo that grates all vagueness, until the lead guitar plunges over the ocean of pain. Compact, it exhibits a theatricality reminiscent of the moods of early post-punk, with an eye-breaking trail of death: let there be precious tears...

4 - Sorrow

Can one describe failure without projecting it into the mire of slowness? Joy/Disaster succeed, with a harrowing arpeggio, a rhythm that slaps the senses and a refrain that is a crown of thorns. Decadent, electrifying, melodic, it strips away all whimsy in a gothic-sounding pulse, where, however, the bass and drums bring us back to a rock that pulses with life. The song that reveals the breadth of their abilities.

5 - Whispering to the wall

Human frailty and meanness are nailed by these initial notes played by a piano full of pain, then the song gives the stage to the singing for a bitter but truthful account. Dark, gloomy, metallic (in that it has all the semblance of an uppercut thrown at our desires), the composition offers the best side of that long line of bands that tried to bring darkwave and post-punk back into the plane of necessity in the 1990s. Here, the four do much better: they oxygenate the present with their melancholy and wisdom. Another nail in the head...

6 - In the end

With the same class as Madrugada, the French combo writes a treatise on wisdom, with the experience of having to compare the real to the dream, to write a different ending. Slow, capable of being obsessive with guitars that are almost hidden but then sublimely accompany Nicolas in a refrain that is an electric shock full of needles and thorns...

7 - Changes

Time, which stagnates and does not change, is surrounded by words and musical notes that make it clear how the band is inclined to keep its foot on the accelerator, but with its eyes open. An up and down, where the rhythm changes, rummaging between our legs, to launch us into a disjointed dance, like puppets stunned by so much evolving force...

8 - Wiping tears

Demons and desires live in the same garden: the four of them raise the tempo, fill the cannons and launch a bomb, fearlessly, to overtake mediocrity and write a new, bombastic treatise of sweat and truth. The drumming and bass are fiery gunslingers eager to make a killing, the guitars are actors with a wonderful, glowing script and the singing the icing on the infectious cake...

9 - Promise

Take Franz Ferdinand and make them hermetic and dragging in a dance full of spectres: a theatre that approaches cabaret, with the rhythm favouring the plunge into the void. Simply enchanting, with a gothic corollary glimpse, for a listen that makes our legs turn into golden wings

10 - Secrets

My God: so much beauty, so much richness... Everything depends on decisions and Joy/Disaster extend the discourse in a vitaminic, robust, lysergic, atomic, scorching path, where at the end of the listening everything burns inside... There is no negativity, but the bitterness of existence that swells the notes and makes our eyes rivers of tears in a gaseous state...


11 - Into a dream

The dreamlike aspect has almost always found adherence in ballads, in gentle flows surrounding poetry. In the last track of this jewel-filled album, however, we witness a display of robust skill in transforming the subject into an enchanting electric arpeggio. The whole is supported by a melody capable of shoving in our faces a series of words that, like the notes present, compact the need for a farewell conscious of a new hallucinating addiction: like the other ten, this song also seizes and unloads its adrenalin in our inebriated listening...

Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford, England
23 November 2023

https://joy-disaster.bandcamp.com/album/hypnagogia

My Review: Ethica - Aether

Ethica - Aether

Let us take the mind and bring it to the Russian glacier, where clouds are harmonious advancing silences, and space a collector of musical textures in search of a mental airport. The passport we need must testify to our ability to separate reality and the dreamlike polar circle, with the latter as the sole interest, the protagonist of our engagement. We are here to talk about a band capable of performing miracles, pressing history and making it become a vast meadow on the bare skin of ice. Intense textures, engaging rhythms and soaring guitars are the foundation on which a voice that is the daughter of enchanting angels is based. They come from Nizhny Novgorod, a city in the heart of central Russia, and it could not be otherwise as everything vibrates within such a needy organ and their sound creatures come from there. They are brushstrokes of lively interactions with the dominant transport of music that changes the reality of gravity to separate us from the everyday and sit next to the sound. Shoegaze and dream pop epicenters allow the participation of a pop educated to containment, yet managing to generate involvement: a rare affair, the surprise in noticing vertices and oscillations kissing to make these eight songs become heavenly rivers. What sends pleasant shivers running is the band's willingness to create continuous weaves, within clear stylistic trajectories but always willing to not necessarily want to limit their work in one musical genre. And so we often find ourselves with the feeling of listening to a myriad of references that seem to want to escape recognition, to find the system of a different and respected identity. An intense, fast, dreamy and deep album, with arpeggios, snaps, fluorescent trails to make us smile, tenderize, dance and then deliver us, as a regal gift, the feeling of having seen the rain become a collection of kisses and hugs. If their propensity to connect the 1990s to the present day is tangible, equally visible is their mental factory determined to seek out arrangements (once one might have assumed the word arrangements) to leave the songs free to follow impulses far from the restrictive confines of styles and genres that would stifle these impulses that are by no means adolescent. The sound reveals a connection to the world, an inhabiting of distance from the country of origin that perhaps does not like this European-American contamination. They might even come from a planet illuminated by an unquestionable state of grace. Fresh, talented, these boys write a letter to the Goddess of Beauty: songs like a soul kiss to a world that has forgotten to dream...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

20th November 2023

ALBUM OF THE YEAR 2023 N. 3

https://ethica.bandcamp.com/album/aether?search_item_id=2917726266&search_item_type=a&search_match_part=%3F&search_page_id=2978194855&search_page_no=0&search_rank=2&logged_in_mobile_menubar=true

My Review: Born Days - My Little Dark

 

                                                                          Born Days - My Little Dark

Darkness is the favourite companion on the journey of time, from the beginning of every living form, because its essence does not require the effort of light and can more easily absorb any opposing force. When it is the art of music that approaches this context, it is possible to feed on the vehement amazement of the sensory oscillations that do not deny their awe of the subject matter. Let us meet an American artist, Melissa Harris, capable of probing, of mixing lucubrations, of transferring the known onto the fuzzy skin of the unconscious, to activate mental and sound circuits in the union that exports beauty from the hypothesised to the real plane. My Little Dark is a jewel within slow space travels, starting with dreamlike traits and ending with somatic ones, having in its dowry the unquestionable ability to physicalise everything. She focuses the project and arms herself with dilations, experimentations, building frames and paintings perfectly oiled in his prodigious electronic orchestration, the true translator of her needs. One is dismayed, frightened, tenderised, never perplexed, always eager for this sweetness that kisses the darkness, crossing the flow of need that leads to endless metamorphosis. These are not songs, but steel structures free of screeching inside our temples, in which dwells a form of gentleness not foreseen but on which it becomes compulsory to feed. Melissa designs the trajectories of sound to erudite them, she draws from oceans of the unexpected to educate them, shaping and seducing by that continuity of the expressive side that leads the listener to establish an unimpeachable truth: if there is such a thing as a concept album, this is the perfect, precise demonstration of it, gripping body and mind in a grip that leaves no scratches. There is a clear sensation of entering a dream, inside a spaceship, with the silence pushing our thoughts to mute, entrusting our only free space to the task of hearing this voice synthesising billions of hypothetical elementary particle, in the interplay of molecules seeking guidance. Then it is the synthesisers, the beats, the plots like suspenseful blades that determine an upheaval that is eternal. Death seems to be a gallant and interesting date, no less than existence: these tracks remove beams, splinters, and frets, and give peace without ringing, transporting existence above the sky. There is no denying the ability to make music swim in an electric blanket full of sponge, with the tinkles cuddling and cloaking. She navigates this incredible creature through the history of electronics, from the purely playful to the joyful, from the pragmatic to the experimental, and then is determined to expose the result in order to make the consequential paralysis pleasant.

She has certainly nourished herself with studies, with approaches, the masters of the possible she surely knows, but, as an unrepentant pupil, she has surpassed them, with this album that demonstrates how the unknown skein, if discovered, can break down all previously experienced joys. It shocks, for its wise dose of salt in the magnetic waves of her computers, her synths, for the sugar deposited in her singing mode, while, when you least expect it, she has already made you addicted to her intent... Quintals of mysticism, kilometres of contact lenses to focus on the invisible, continuous games between naivety and wisdom, lead her to cross different musical genres without reins or control, ending up making us disjointed but perfectly in tune with her objective, which seems to be to dismember the certainties and boredom that can come from that in which we instead find resource and affinity. She puts psychedelia, Dream-Pop, Coldwave, Darkwave into her refined funnel to perish them, with intelligence and just the right amount of nastiness.
She takes the imaginative passages and stamps them to the real ones, in the distorted dance of a spectacular confusion, always with a rhythm that does not want to reach maximum speed: for this reason, too, her is the courage of a strong and aware soul, because she does not seek success but an educational expression, one that can, perhaps, also be disorienting. Darkness covers every hope, every smile, leaving it to the submerged of the mind to guide the resources that her music generously exposes, ranging and sowing songs like bank robberies without bullets or masks on the face: she plunges into the robbery, delivering a slow, anaesthetising laugh to fear. She writes a miracle for a total of fifty-one minutes: the initial measure of her infinite class...  

Song by Song

1 - Enemy

And it is moody carillon, in the slowness that welcomes atmospheres both sweet and gloomy, in a loop on which the voice flies with its enemy, for a sadness that receives resounding support: applause!

2 - My Little Dark

The flight grows, in height and speed, but always without pain or sweat: everything is calibrated perfectly for a torch that makes the sky the child of this caress that embraces, to make a proposal to death that here lives a challenge under the banner of enchantment.

3 - Bird Song

Melissa's desire for life is as much in the words of the lyrics as in the music: starting with the chirping of a nature that still wants to be present, we arrive at a keyboard that sketches the sky, with vocal chords that are filled with electric tension, while the melody is so human that it moves us... 4 - Over Again

"Burn myself over again": a thunderstorm of intentions finds a home in the spectral Over Again, a secular litany that invites one to dance but with all senses alert. A skilful darkwave blend in appearance but not in the specific musical genre, it drifts into the basin of an essential dreamwave with electrowave brushstrokes to define an immense, suspended and liturgical track

5 - Dreams

A walk in the park reveals particles of important thoughts: an electric cable of great tension is constructed, in a spectacular sieve of versatile notes prone to move in the contours of a trip-hop that courts neo-psychedelia.

6 - How To Disappear

It rains clouds in your heart, with the impression that Melissa knows how to use some of the wisdom of classical music and then dismember it to leave us with a sound carpet that is almost simple, but in reality reveals an immense ability to give balance between the various phases of the song. 7 - Ganymede

Perhaps the album's most solemn moment, the summary of its will and manifest ability to be a subtle needle that penetrates the senses. After the initial dreamy part comes the electronic evolution that offers a perfectly controlled drama.

8 - Deep Empty (DMT Feelings)

Perhaps depression invades the lane of this album: it does so with words and music that are justifiably grievous, that seem to be the daughters of ancient sadnesses brushed over and experienced by the Cure and the Sound, albeit with different musical attitudes. But here there is a pleasant lack of breath...

 9 - Destroyer

The theatre of horror throws itself into a lyric that messes up the clothes of thoughts. Energetic loop successions and synth reciting heavy progressions make the track an effervescent bow in which fear grins happily. Clamorous!

10 - Conscious Conscience

Certain thoughts have voices that reveal truths that seem far away: to conclude the album, the Chicago artist spends minutes as if a psychologist's couch were welcoming her deepest intimacy. One is as if enveloped in a slow, obsessive slap, with the palms of the hands slowly crushing our necks. While the voice seems to free itself of everything and ascend into the arms of the clouds...

A resounding work that the Old Scribe describes as the second best album of this 2023...

Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
19th November 2023

https://borndays.bandcamp.com/album/my-little-dark

My Review: The Beatles - Now and Then

The Beatles - Now and Then

There are magics that require no explanation, no disturbance, no further gravity to sink in. They wander, they skim, they specify, remaining free to be untouchable. Continuing in time an untiring, precise, straightforward race to enter Olympus, where perfection reigns supreme. You can argue all you want about everything, not about this event, because the song released under the acronym The Beatles is such and should be proportioned to a global significance that surpasses time as the four are, without a doubt, the most influential band, and not only, of all time. They are the earthly rulers of a beauty already recognised by the vault of heaven. Rather than a comeback here we speak of an assemblage operation, in order to make eternal and infinite the need for the idea that this tank of precious fuel knows no end. Whether it was technology that favoured it matters little. It really does. The song is a poignant testimony to how simplicity has been the spark of their every production, to touch the most accessible, strongest emotions, in an unquestionable gathering. One cries, one cringes at the knowledge that the text, in its fluidity, guarantees access to understanding. The fact that it does not please us, does not touch the heart does not matter: it exists as a vehicle for encounters, for messages to be verbalised, for unbridled races within. And because death does not belong to the gods.

As is often the case with the four from Liverpool, the music is an ambassador of delicacy, of a poignant, perceptible inclination towards that which brings pain, with John Lennon's voice that seems to pierce the clouds and fall in a slow flight towards our ears that become an embrace. There are certainties that need the right mode to be expressed, and in this soft jewel everything comes out without friction, in an earthly wander that gathers beats and thoughts, steeped in grey worries and doubts, and the emblematic truth that distance has always been an unsolved problem. And nothing certifies this more than love. A text that addresses, specifically, the relationship with time in the field of love, where everything can tarnish strength and convictions. Two hundred and forty-eight seconds of an hourglass that stirs, shakes, opens wide its entirety within our fragility, distributing, with its soft gait, within our mental exercise, petals that seem to know immortality. The style of the world's most famous cockroaches is intact, it does not seem true that they have crossed the decades of absence reappearing as if nothing had changed. Instead... We were talking about magic, and it is all true. Harmony reigns supreme, the arrangements, minimalist, and the unexaggerated production allow the song to have a notable place in their journey. In what period would you place this song? Sixties? Seventies? Now? No: there is no answer because of this ability, always incredible, that makes their artistic work able to escape time, preceding it, to settle, like a flower on a rock, in the place of perfection. And then: being able to make the impossible real, and do it in the perfect way, could only happen to The Beatles. The verse, the refrain, embracing and convincing, testify to how in just a few minutes one can be part of an enchantment, irresistible. Compact and poignant, it transfers what was nothing more than a Lennon demo to Planet Beatles: whether it is right, wrong, reasonable, it is of little use because that musical line-up is beyond reason, due to the fact that certain appointments are unfailing, dutiful, and nothing should find room to question that. 

A perfect Pop Song that makes its placement in a valley full of people listening imaginable, to make the embrace with heaven possible. Slow, quick to touch an inevitable addiction, the song sums up and expands the capabilities of those four phenomenons, proving that, however much technology has facilitated this creative process, it all comes from a humanity, from an infinite, unquestionable class. That it is then a text that deals with distance that brings people closer together again demonstrates their absolute power. There is nothing nostalgic about this song, given its depth. Rather, and this is inevitable, time will be wasted accusing the two living Beatles of wanting to take advantage of this new production. But they always did, all four of them together, flooding our hearts with perfectly connected quantity and quality. Nothing has changed. Because a Beatles composition can make a day something special: NOW AND THEN...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

16th November 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW55J2zE3N4

My Review: Sun's Spectrum - The Silence After The Fall

Sun's Spectrum - The Silence After All


Imagine the sky, full of pains, tensions, bitterness, spasms, discontent, enter inside a disco, visit the mad dance inclination of disheveled souls, perfectly gathered by ten songs, and witness a delightful delirium, in which everything is shown compact, oxygenated, inclined to suspend time. The creators of this musical spasm are two nocturnal creatures from Udine, Italy, supported magnificently by the indefatigable Cold Transmission Music, who elevate the cultural aspect of dance, not just the physical. These are well-structured thunderstorms, lapilli of light that educate thought even before the bodily boundary, teaching the senses dilation. One witnesses a spectacle of threads, governed by the electric gait, within musical genres that acclaim listening as they are aware that they can generate amazement and inexhaustible energy. 

An avalanche of multiple crossovers near effervescent slopes affixed to keyboards and computers unleash the desire to float on the smooth track of a night meant to embrace this lineup, a duo devoted to the study of the history of what is mistakenly called synthetic music: they disrupt the plane of conviction and, as a new liturgy, strike the blow to demonstrate how much humanity resides in these ten tracks. Brave, extreme, dark on the surface but clear in the head, they write an album that must find residence in the mental apartment of human beings eager for knowledge, ready to measure the limit of dance and thought, mixed with skill and extreme precision. Electroclash hyacinths are vehemently structured into ebm flows, which in turn take the hand of the most cultured virtue to deposit pseudo-violent dives into intelligent synth pop. A tide of interpenetrating looks immobilize the fears well represented in the grooves of this work to reach ecstasy. The industrial breath does not escape: it is seduced and inserted into the powerful and high dreamlike beats, neighbours of trained nightmares. It is easy to sense how the fun for Livio Caenazzo and Daniele Iannacone is to be able to experiment with daring formulas, while also employing the comfort of highly simple plots and thus approached by the difficulty of inserting fruitful forays that verge on the metaphysical. Alienating, neurotic, wheezing, this album is a specter in the mirror, under that sky mentioned earlier. It travels starting from a German base, with Belgian and Yugoslavian fantasy, to finally glide into northern Italy: a small globe capable, however, of being generous and astounding, to lead the vault of heaven to dream of permanence in the dance hall. The singing follows the directions of the various musical genres on which it navigates with elasticity, strength and conviction. The guitars have a darkwave outfit, they are almost perfectly hidden, but when they are most noticeable they seem to rave spectacularly, having on the other side a programming and synth base that makes the amalgam flow. 

In this full-bodied unleashed mantle the slow Epic gives a different and moving emotion, spectacular because its slowness is a stage on which to catch one's breath with the kiss of sympathetic tears. The celestially enchanting aspect concerns the fact that the band is perfectly integrated into the gloomy but full of life world of their new record label, giving Cold Transmission Music a chance to further shake up the whole dance movement, with sweat, frothing at the mouth and tension drawing a mephistophelean expression in the listener. The three singles that preceded the release (God Is a Machine, Paint is Just a Noise, and All I Want) have lavishly created curiosity and desire, which, with great skill, have been confirmed by the other seven, for a result that makes this album a favourite for Old Scribe to dance to this 2023!

Album out on 17th November 2023

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

15th November 2023 2023

the-silence-after-the-fall