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: Boulder Fields - With All the Other Ghosts

Boulder Fields - With All the Other Ghosts

Even musicians have a pedigree and it is often the basis of a series of certainties that envelop the listener, removing fears and uncertainties. The Scottish Cam Fraser's is impressive, a wonderful ride into the territories of what is difficult to define but easy to enjoy. It is the latter that surrounds, defines and transports the experience of his music towards a truly remarkable form of relaxation. We are in the zone of a cosy, gentle, polite indie folk, adept at approaching even other genres almost surreptitiously, with class and kindness. One finds, therefore, scattered along the eleven butterflies full of sensual and sometimes slightly melancholic waves, traces of lo-fi, of a folk that seems to scratch itself with rock mixtures, but always in a whisper. 

The Edinburgh star is joined by musicians who manage to enhance the minimalist wave of songs to make the whole thing sound like the work of a band with thousands of years behind it, when in fact it is a debut, at least under that name. The Old Scribe emphasises how the world seems to be criss-crossed by these landscapes, by these protagonists of stories that glue you into an accommodating and profound reflection. Much happens with pints of beer, crowded tables, long gazes, hands grasping clods of earth in the parks and the distinct feeling that the instruments translate the oscillations of these life experiences. Everything smells of permanence in real life, without temptation but taking responsibility for giving dignity to the happenings. 

Cam whispers, sings with a mature voice touched by magic magnets, with the ability to modulate it with great technique, using the choruses well, never intrusive, while the piano, mandolin, acoustic guitar and organ are the conductors of strategic flows full of warmth, soldiers with coloured feathers that make their splendid figure both in city stories and when the spaces offer the joy of nature. The acoustic bass is a constant amazement, as are the brushes of the drums, which seem to drive the undulations towards the applause of the clouds.

Warm, physical, metaphysical, emblematic, essential, the album offers mental, visual panoramas, in a crowded collective of feelings in constant boiling, where Cam himself throws salt in with his experience gained over all these years, in which he trafficked with his old band The Cateran, supporting Nirvana in the UK in 1989. But no chaos, no discomfort to pour into our ears, but rather messages carried by pigeons educated in patience, in the most sensual storytelling imaginable...

There are no songs to be preferred, but a set of fascinations to be preserved under the harsh skin of our reality: if you are looking for a solid partnership with well-being, this work will make you very happy indeed...

   Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

1st July 2024

https://boulderfields.bandcamp.com/album/with-all-the-other-ghosts

My Review: Man of Moon - Machinism

 Man Of Moon - Machinism

For several years now, new rivalries have appeared, problematic coexistences weighing down our existences, making individual and mass relationships extremely complicated. The advancement of technology, physical and mental immobility, and a massive dose of laziness are generating tensions that are impossible not to see and feel.

Some of this flows into the band Man Of Moon's resounding second album, a long-distance effort that allowed joy and awe to embrace each other in 2020, and that effect endures to this day: Dark Sea was one of the most significant debuts of recent years. 

And after four, Iain Stewart (the new drummer) and Chris Bainbridge (vocals, guitar, bass, electronics), offer a work that is perfectly attuned to the social themes addressed and to music that knows how to range in an over-the-top way, finding a way to give slight signs of continuity with the first work, but above all the will to create a sonic theme that specifies intentions and directions, an open-air laboratory, an investigation, a metamorphosis, a slow walk in the heart of fantasies and needs that are perfectly in sync.

It is a long look inside images, habits, of what has changed and brought to excess the need to place oneself constantly in the spotlight, with the consequent death of privacy, of deep thought, consigning everything to the merciless hands of the Market, with the old values exhaling their last breaths and the new ones being the prerogative of a new youth no longer able to remain connected with the older one.

The album is a scudding, gentle, sonic vice within habits, a highlighting of upheavals with a gaze that is the basis of atmospheres ranging between gloomy and cheerful: Chris and Iain do not want to deliver a resigned attitude but to be messengers endowed with strength, courage, removing dangerous and harmful spaces from hallucinations and extremisms. Music to educate, to seek a different contact to create conditions for improvements that can trigger new strategies, also through dance, an ancient system for compacting souls.

To do all this, the use of instruments, the same as in the debut, here finds the refined ability to extend the colours, the sounds, with the ability to channel thoughts into clear emotions, albeit also through an inevitable dose of drama. But you can hear the project, the intention that runs through the eleven episodes, to create a mood and a mantra that keeps the tension high, a polite scream that puts on those shivers capable of not leaving the listening mind impassive.

 Sensitivity grows, the shrewdness of using doses of rational implants that are not misunderstood, ensuring that the whole is an undeniable opportunity to make a portentous leap towards something not previously done, not necessarily to be defined but certainly to be experienced, creating the terrain of a novelty that makes behaviour unequivocal, giving a thrashing to the excessive desire for freedom, a leitmotif that in the end is the cause of almost all evil today.

Respect is exhumed, the pride of human intelligence that wants to reject artificial intelligence, even if it welcomes the latter, but establishing different boundaries. An extremely shrewd, profound work, so effective that it leaves one completely surprised, shocked, with at the end of listening the urge to say enough and roll up one's sleeves.

The compositions arrive on the epidermis and then enter the venereal circuits, the labyrinths of thought, the bones deciding fragmented but powerful dances, a continuous shaking without pause: it is certainly not the slowest songs that grant calm, because none of this exists in this thunderous album, which is nothing if not a gentle but impossible to stop avalanche on our part, resulting in a cry for the only necessary general present miracle, which is to be established in the awakening of consciousness, coming out of the poisoning and subsequent torpor.

The moon here is really split in two and the man looking at it must move, change perspective in his gaze, think about the survival of true wealth, the intact wealth, and be shaken by the rays coming from there, without any resistance. Increasingly isolated from the social context, the human being of Machinism can enjoy a thunderous and important concession: to see for real the distances, the sense of inner and outer space, and to seek within himself those capacities that make contact the only possible form of salvation.  The musical flows are the basis of important inspections, of genres that mingle in search of their own elevation, in an earthly circle where melody, harmony and rhythm live an intense twinning, delivering songs that, in addition to thoughts and dance, are able to console, to see the band retain their initial roots but with the great will to draw new plots, inspections, for those stylistic possibilities that confer, undeniably, massive applause. So many novelties, an ups and downs of sidereal ‘games’, inspections that end up delivering a truly miraculous framework, to make this art a resounding foothold, without smearing. 

The electronics live a new season, less separated from the rock/indie/alternative structure, for a union that puts down different roots, offers the hook for connections desired but impossible, before, to become a devastating reality. Iain enhances the rhythmicity, creating innovative spaces, able to join Chris's sonic prairies in a combo that envelops, sows new and different dreams that in a few minutes turn out to be real and credible, in a sensorial rush that enhances, perfectly, a genial preventive machination.  The bass and guitar are more united than in the debut, and the keyboard bases are less isolated, less conspicuous but more in keeping with a united message, which starts with what is listened to in its entirety, ending up with a complexity that slips perfectly into pleasantness. The main form is to diminish the desire for the verse and the refrain, to make the listener concentrate more on the signals, the sounds, the dynamics, the flows that seem to become matter, second by second, with a high control of the expressive structures.

The production, which is excellent, enhances a general sensation that is more intuitive than practical, a sonic non-concept album that seems to be so, to compact itself perfectly with the lyrics that are decisive, energetic, determined with paintings of poetic verses that enchant and surprise.   The first part of Machinism thrives on greater expressions of elevated rhythmic propensities, where speed is a methodical urgency balanced towards message comprehension. The second, where there is certainly no lack of rhythm and a certain sonic ‘aggressiveness’, appears to be an agitated sleep, a journey into dreamlike activities that must be interrupted as there is a task to be accomplished in a hurry. Perfectly uniting these two sections, it is immediately clear that the order of the songs has involved a good deal of rational work, for a result that highlights genius, skill and the identification of that cultural aspect that today's music seems to want to overlook. But the two boys from Glasgow have broad shoulders, an alert and brilliant intuition, intent on being not fellow listeners but the inspirers of new vitality, in an urgency pregnant with sparks and perfectly friendly moonbeams.

Let's arm ourselves with curiosity and dive into these eleven episodes: there is beauty waiting for us, with open arms, full of confidence...

Song by Song

1 - RISE

Landing on planet beauty begins with the band's immediately recognisable style, the long guitar sound that glues together a sense of friction that fascinates and shakes at the same time, and then off with a rock tribality that winks at barely hinted at electronic experimentation. 

Magnetic.

2 - YOU AND I

The third to last single before the release of this second album, it has the ability to give the singing mode the ability to capture the attention and then approach a form of expression close to less marked space rock. Dark, electric, sensual, the song takes us on a conspicuous leap in time, with the Seventies marking out how not many changes are needed to make a song interesting and worthwhile. In the finale, the atmosphere experiences splendid rhythmic alternations.

Sexy.

3 - SWIM

Initial atoms of Industrial and Ebm then become a torch contemplating sunshine and rhythmicity with the skin of psychedelia running alongside the beat, for a hypnotic dance that tattoos the short melody in the circle of eternity. Suicide would applaud, as would Front 242: from a minimalistic approach to an outdated era, Man of Moon colour instincts and drives with a riff that nails the wall.

Showy.

4 - VIDEO

In the penultimate single, we are thunderstruck by the perfect balance between rhythm and atmosphere, which seem like separate environments but with magical grafts that make us vibrate, giving us a feeling of great concern and melancholy, where reality is transported through this minimalist form of expression. With a tragic, frightening flavour, it could be the perfect soundtrack to an Akira Kurosawa film, as it allows fear to be an intelligent companion, using drops of Krautrock and shreds of psychedelia.

Devastating.

5 - TIME

It's up to the last single to define the maturation, the progression, the new visual and sensorial spaces that the band wants to manipulate, through a robotic form that contemplates a vocal that seems to cry without too much pain, giving us a strange sensation that is what makes us fall in love with this song, which is nothing more than a mysterious jewel that puts our time in disorder. 

Magical.

6 - THE TIDE

The initial approach takes us into the home of the Velvet Underground and then slowly escapes into the craters of a breathtaking suspension. With slowness, the duo's melody becomes an aurora borealis, an endless spectacle. And when a semi-acoustic track makes us magnets in a state of contemplation, then we can say that the band knows how to paralyse convictions, generating a splendid inner marasmus...

Hypnotic.

7 - IN THE WATER

Here's the combo that wrote the splendid Dark Sea reminding us of that album through a funnel of nerves miraculously held up by their charisma, by the undeniable ability to suspend atmospheres, to be the expression of a new melody in transformation, attaching a rhythmicity that drags without ever exploding.

Miraculous.

8 - REIGN

Neurotic, dramatic, explosive with style, a lunar beam coming out of its orbit, the song is a whiplash kissed by electric corals, an alternative that seeks links with electronics that appear but do not contaminate, to give the whole a feeling of modern sacredness.

Mysterious.

9 - MACHINE THAT BREATHES

The most incandescent tear comes out of magnetic notes of a piano that immediately makes us sink down and obedient, in order to listen to a sweet torment that springs from the whispered voice of Chris, here the magnet that stuns without any hesitation. It surrounds the senses with its almost resigned tone, a silken-gloved clap, transferring a pain seeking and gaining a sweetness as consolation...

Thunderous.

10 - RUN AND HIDE

Released in October 2021, the song knows a captivating retouching, a greater propensity for mysticism, a caustic prayer, an introverted preoccupation that arrives at the realisation of doubt about our survival, while the minimalist structure, with the final guitar to stun the bitterness, makes this composition the polar star that guides us towards our last chance of understanding...

Lunar.

11 - THE WILD

The greatest astonishment comes with the closing track, a genuflection that envisages an abnormal decadence, a vortex that resembles a hissing, with the notes of the piano keyboard (surrounded by a spectral synth that hypnotises the atmosphere) being a sad song that precedes Chris's, in a heart-breaking idyll, an outpost of a sadness that has no foothold but releases toxins in large quantities. A singing never before expressed, capable of being a swing in the wind, a going and coming back scratching our soul with a strange sweetness. Then its finale, chemical haze in transparency, offers us the ultimate punch in the face....

Ungovernable.

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

18th May 2024

You can purchase it here:

https://manofmoonband.bandcamp.com/album/machinism-2

Written and Recorded by Man of Moon 
Produced by Man of Moon and Paul Gallagher 
Mixed and engineered by Paul Gallagher 
Mastered by Ryan Shwabe 
Artwork by Peter Kelly