My Review: St. Jimi Sebastian Cricket Club - Soothing Nights

 St. Jimi Sebastian Cricket Club - Soothing Nights

There is a poem that flies through the air, it has no ink marks on its skin but vibrant notes on its back, in a contortion that sucks in the sky, embellishing, surprisingly, the luminous wake of a sleepless night. A song that in its poignant monotony reveals streams of beautiful committees of sadness, with the intention of exploring celestial space contemplating a dying star. It does not need to vary, except in the rhythm that increases, with the entry of the drums and an increasingly enveloping atmosphere, to combine the lyrics with a set of sound clusters that, like a liquid chasm, compact the universe of feelings.

How can one make farewell a party with drops of mountain rock sliding into the sea? Soothing Nights is written as grief governs every thrust that would like to make life a simple, impotent memory. There is in the rise of the rhythm a mode that we have come to admire with Belle and Sebastian, but in this case everything seems to meet a fate in which the absence of the song's breath will leave us in utter commotion….   The Swedish quintet explores a feather, the happenings of the passage of time, observing from a perspective that seems to be that of an autumnal cloud: everything is inclined to balance the nervous vein of a malaise to make it come alive under our gaze, which can be nothing more than a teary-eyed applause. Markus Hahn with his guitar brushes bubbles, Jimi Sebastian's guitar (who is also the band's vocalist) is the twin that reaffirms this vertiginous alchemy, and they are assisted by David Lindberg's nostalgic keyboard, Mats Skoglund's almost mute but essential bass and Fabian Ris Lundblad's simple but perfect drums, which is a caress that brings vivacity and order, to make this emotional avalanche a miracle: if it had room in your heart it would certainly smile...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

20 April 2024

https://open.spotify.com/track/3eky1P2ngoFfbBrmtUBmY9?si=_FeTg6NIRC2Uu_mLqUND9g

My Review: Loom - Eternal Aphelium E.P.

Loom - Eternal Aphelium E.P.

The din of silence makes souls eager for warmth self-propelled, altering the direction and permanence of their needs, not allowing themselves to tergiversate, not making the best use of time.

Sweden's Loom take the sledge and head north, into the space that makes their minds a dream-embracing glow, carrying the suitcase of reality tightly in their arms and uvulas.

In all this, the new E.P. shows some changes, surprises that stun and make listening a celestial crossing swollen with visions and perceptions that warm the heart, fighting the cold and anger of living today.

Monika Axelsson returns as the band's lead vocalist, while Evelina Nicklasson has decided to take a break. In addition, in one track, we also get to hear Roland Klein singing along with guitarist Fredrik Axelsson.

We witness a mutation, an elaborate thoughtfulness aimed at giving the compositions and the sound the possibility of becoming celestial matter, a close relative of dreams, in an embrace that allows the Nordic line-up to express a seductive, bewitching talent, generous above all in making slower rhythms a stylistic mooring close to Post-Rock meteors.  But it remains essential, for the sake of the record, to recognise that shoegaze is approached here with great exploratory exigency, almost as if the four had studied possible settlements and graceful, but effective, improvements.

Succeeding.

Four new paintings and that Aphelium III released in January of this year. The territory on which the writing and expressive skills that coined an embrace out of a wicker rocking chair, with a small flask of whiskey, rests is a dune full of snow that acts as a springboard to the sky. The guitars, in this winter jewel, find a way to space out in powerful and rarefied crossovers with the other instruments, concretely engaging the possibility of compacting the various expressive individualities. As for the vocalists, there emerges a solidarity, a support, a winking, a sweet intimacy that dresses the listening with vibrant emotions, showing, compared to the rest of the group's discography, a greater and more pronounced propensity to grant them the stage, on which the light of approval establishes a generous, benevolent contact of care and sustenance.  Capable of reproducing the evident structure of the musical genre that has found in Slowdive and Low (because, really, we are witnessing the mixture of a work that includes Shoegaze, Post-Rock and Slowcore) the major point of reference in these five songs, these artists, through Henrik Viberg's careful production and also their own, paint the light effects with a frame that makes everything ethereal, as if the sensation of entering directly into their compositional process became real. One reaches across mental spaces, feelings, in a feast where sounds hold both joy and pain, making one's breath mute but filled with great vibrations.

Eternal Aphelium becomes, thus, an E.P. of concessions, a spectacular vessel between solid qualities of the past that do not disappear, but are eager to accommodate a mixture that makes the quartet pregnant, to make Loom's art the possibility of acquiring thrills and reflections.

Clouds as landing guitars, drumming as thunder in a hormonal and exploratory state and the bass as a distributor of wisdom and support, and finally a keyboard that closes the path of expression to consolidate the evocative power. 

 Song by Song

1 - Slowmotion

The emotion, quickest to manifest itself, comes from the opener track, a boulder of rock rising into the air, with shoegaze guitars towering, to then allow Monika's suave voice to caress our eyes and reach the refrain, which condenses the whole, transporting bodies to the house of dreams. Like a circular merry-go-round, the perimeter of sound grasps more than thirty years of this musical genre, polishing the medals of valour won...

2 - My Melancholy Girl 

A guitar arpeggio and a subtle keyboard force the rhythm to slow down, but the beat becomes tachycardic: first Fredrik's voice and then Monika's are the ground where sweet tears are born. A reasoned chaos, kept at bay with class, in a sunny lullaby that expresses the talent of a song as a probe, to walk in the sky, with the nakedness of sound to warm the footsteps of a poetic music as never before

3 - Trapdor

Powerful, as in numerous episodes of Adorable and Ferment's Catherine Wheel, the third track sees Fredrik and Roland singing together, amidst psychedelic shrapnel and drumming that defies the patience of the sleeping sky. Monika's countermelody also arrives in the refrain, in a compact, lunar, sweetly neurotic combo, making us dance, with the bass pushing its pulse to make it all a complex amplexus of colours and vibrations.  

4 - Aphelium III

The single that anticipated E.P. is a drug that fills the mind with visions, with the scratchy guitar but also capable of building an almost ferocious melody, while the two voices stroll in unison to create a poignant melodic line. Sparks that generate recalls, fascinations, resulting in an addiction that makes for repeated and enjoyable listening...

5 - Proximity

The farewell is spectacular: Monika leaves her angelic voice on the lanes of a simple but generous arpeggio of approaches, with the bass gliding towards the chest, then leading us into the wind, a spiritual ascent towards an eternity that could really have this jewel as its soundtrack. The keyboard here is more incisive as far as it maintains its minimalism, but those few notes immerse us in the great light that the whole produces, giving the whole beauty and cuddling, to make the whole become a perfect fade-out, a slow procession with the garment of generosity to wrap a majestic work...

Out on 8th Mrach 2024

Fredrik Axelsson - Guitars, keyboards, vocals

Roland Klein - Basses, programming and backing vocals 

Eddie Wilmin - Keyboard

Monika Axelsson - Vocals

Recorded by Loom

Produced by Henrik Viberg and Loom

Mixed and Mastered by Henrik Viberg

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

7th March 2024

My Review: Ond Cirkel - Barriärer

Ond Cirkel - Barriärer

Two girls, two boys, Swedes, have taken the Gothenburg sky and set it on fire: fuck kindness, it's time for sincerity, extreme, to which the old scribe welcomes. Joyfully! Steel is scratched with guitars and drums, the rest is a subtle sorrow that condenses into a sonic stretch the size of a pin-prick clap. Vertigo of idyllic tension swims in Sanna Lodin's voice to complete the miracle: 1980 is resurrected, it's even much better than we remembered it, and Killing Joke are certainly celebrating this track in a sincere embrace of this Sweden band in an amazing state of form!

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Supino

19th April 2023

https://ondcirkel.bandcamp.com/album/barri-rer

My Review: La Santé - Stratchy

 La Santé - Stratchy

EBM clouds scratch the air, a Swedish soul pilots them, capable of making perfect syntheses in a single track, a perfectly summarised dictation of history: within it, music and voice draw the genre's tendency to never stop searching for the right loop, the mode that nails and develops memory and necessity. A great work of simplification can be deduced, a decomposition that has kept alive robotic cells that conquer, go inside the repetitions that seduce and gather the obedience of those who do not demand, but offer the absence of their own thought for a murderous and heavy dance... Two tracks that balance madness and sensuality...

Alessandro Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

11th April 2023

https://lasante.bandcamp.com/album/strachy

My Review: Loom - in the absence of something better e.p.

 Loom - in the absence of something better e.p.

Beauty dresses five branches of a fertile forest, in the extreme centre of pleasures that meet and manifest their power, reliability, meaning and value. They are songs, objects of work and of feeling life as a phenomenal opportunity to release thoughts within lights and shadows, triggering emotions, thoughts, in a luminescent dust that intoxicates the ugliness of existence and brings it to life.

Because this is what Loom do: they touch and touch the senses to induce them to snap to their feet and head for peace, refreshment of the soul and contemplation of the intensity of things. A resounding return: the maturity of the sound, the focus on structures from which the depth of their gaze can be understood, the melodic research that continues to be intent on containing feelings and words as fellow travellers. The four give us three new compositions and the two latest singles, for a game of sighs, of sadnesses that are delicate, that do not want to crush the breath inside a bell jar, but rather the opposite: the band from Kalmar has found a way to balance their immeasurable talent by fully revealing the entirety of their breath, in which opposites are deposited that not only attract but love each other, coming out to let their lungs take in air in need of colour. Here then are slow, fast, dark, cheerful songs, in the blend of their highly recognisable style, capable of shaking the coldness of our thoughts and covering them in velvet.

They have grown up, taken their talent and slammed it against the wall: out of it has come a thick liquid of intoxicating perfumes, in five distinct fragrances, and now our body can feel enveloped in beauty...

Let us get to know it all, to experience the joy of human beings falling into the arms of the four Swedes, sirens with enchanted voices and capable of absorbing any resistance...

Song by Song

1 windowbath

The shoegaze cloud enters the woods, slowly opening its arms and delivering the first walk. The modality of Evelina's song is a pain in search of a listening: she finds it in the compactness of the guitars, nourishing and transversal, and in the games of suspension of rhythm, where the bass emerges, and then away, the reverberations light up, everything becomes sacred, a procession that incorporates several voices and elevates the song as queen of transformation

2 a beautiful beginning of an end

Released in July last year, the song loses its intro, making it gain in compactness and speed, immediately throwing us into its Alternative and Shoegaze vortex, in the chiaroscuro of a conscious sadness, in which the sigh is a pleasant aggression of rising tears, as is the music, a portal of sparkles given by the guitars of Fredrik, master of sound poetry, who harnesses the guitar like a gentle weapon with which he can delicately explode his talent. The drumming is an enthralling nervous mixture, a kiss to the nineties, Alternative Americana zone, and then it all clicks together. It cries running...

3 wishes fade to dust

The keyboard in Loom is a kiss from the gods, absorbed in the talent and the rain of scratches rising from those keys. And it is a struggle to resist the dripping of the heart: because the singing squeezes it, the bass crushes it, the guitar, wave of a nameless ocean, shows itself subtle and delicate. On the rhythm changes the Swedish band are now aware of how much can be done and this is what they make you hear in the song, a powder keg that shows the Sad Pop side, between Dreampop rustles with a face full of pain and the knowledge that to be able to touch their strings is to rise to the sky. A miracle that in the end will leave your thoughts wet with awareness...

4 let us disappear

It's back to the early nineties, when music was looking for carefreeness, crutches for gentle days and the desire to stay in touch with an inner melody. Remarkable work on the guitar sound, which while scratching manages to be soft, handing over to the drumming and bass for a ride where shoegaze sighs respect the general mood, without encroaching on the pop lane.

Psychedelia appears for brief seconds, showing once again how the band's songs are arms open to different possibilities.

One dances with open eyes with the desire to say goodbye to the world, to sharing, to find peace within oneself...

5 the dream is over

For the song that closes the EP, the old scribe reproposes part of the review he wrote on a night filled with tears and joy, in heavenly exhaustion... 

"A lyric that makes the tears slide from the brain to the tip of the toes: a new salt lake in which to dive, in which to find the dreams paralysed by a reality that opposes, oppresses, kicks to reach the goal of extinguishing even the sturdiest of faiths.

In a corollary of shimmering guitars, capable of being rhythmic and dazzling, we dance hunched over but reassured by Evelina Nicklasson's miraculously angelic voice that rises and falls like her words, tattooed on the rhythmic precipices of Fredrick Axelsson, the guardian of every murderous impulse, because we often come to believe that feedback and its wah-wah are sharp knives aimed at defending us from senseless gestures. But one might think instead that it is actually causing them: a mystery of music, to be contemplated.

Roland Klein, Henrik Viberg and Eddie Wilmin (producer and assistant musician) are the masons who raise the sound system to lead it to the sky, in a chant that reaches the emotion with virulent and melancholic splashes.

And it drowns in a fugue that defeats all intentions, with the Baltic Sea blessing the poignant song with a telluric tremor that will inhabit your ecstasy coloured with Nordic tears, perfect..."

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

6th April 2023

https://loom2.bandcamp.com/album/in-the-absence-of-something-better-e-p

My Review: Art Fact - in Fact

 Art Fact - in Fact

Cassettes: so lacking in sound quality but full of magic, simple to use and so easy to break, mystery and infinite joy that they have characterised the days of more than a generation.

In September 1989, one arrived in the newsroom: In Fact, by Swedish band Art Fact, and it was love at first listen, I wrote about it and was delighted. Today I decided to listen to this album again and talk a little about it.

Considering where the band came from, in that fertile period then, it seemed really hallucinating and surprising that a musical reality of that specific genre could exist in that place in the world.

Stockholm has loved Synth, ever since the 1970s, and in the late 1980s, the city's scene reinforced the need to push forward the Belgian and Francophone scenes. The trio, very young but already experienced, set out to create the idea of a more gradual, less extremist sweep than other bands in the Swedish capital. The result is a bundle of thought-provoking, danceable pieces, with a well-pronounced English vocal, fragments of electronics that would be developed by other bands shortly afterwards. In Fact makes it very clear where multiple elements can be found in compositions and how lightness sometimes needs to be exposed. A real hidden gem.

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

18th February 2023

https://artfact.bandcamp.com/album/in-fact

My Review: The Secret French Postcards - Life Got Claws

 The Secret French Postcards - Life Got Claws

Two countries shake hands, for an artistic union that sows urban fragments and is constantly devoted to dark and radioactive dance.

The Swedes TSFP and the German label Cold Transmission Music strike  a deal to make the earthly path truthful and credible, an account of the daily spasms with elegance in the sounds, filled with Darkwave stabs and contemplating the support of that Coldwave that knows how to become as warm as a kiss from Lucifer.

What we are going to listen to is something powerful, transversal and oblique, representative of needs and propensities that have been trying to enhance consensus for decades, like a spokesman of manifest adhesions to musical fascinations born between Belgium and England, which then landed in the Slavic countries and Eastern Europe. Music that generates introspection and abandonment, dreams cloaked in essential propaedeutic attitudes. The Portuguese Pedro Code, undisputed priest of the prodigious IAMTHESHADOW, here steps into the control room as a producer and head of mixing, giving the Swedes a deserved and necessary added value.

One has deep admiration for this work that condenses messages and qualities into an expanse of rumbles and fragrances that stun, a unicum that is only considered as such if one has the intention of studying in depth what the massive musical production offers. Here we find ourselves in the presence of champions, mastiffs and thoroughbred horses that bite and run through the territories of sadness with growing capacity...

Something essentially necessary comes out of the amplifiers of these seemingly glacial souls, to contour and perturb our mental palaces: the Swedes play seriously with brushes, reducing the palette at their disposal, but perfectly outlining the areas they are interested in for a set of songs that can also be the ideal frame to look at on days when thought struggles to be precise. But the tracks are sonic and emotional investigations, conductors of thinking dances, analytical sessions that reveal truths we often wish to deny.

From The Cure to Ultravox to Echo & The Bunnymen, via Sheffield and Belgrade, everything piles up and makes visible the origin of magic that does not melt. But then these enchanters decide that it is necessary to sow their own mark and therefore all the compositions come to expand, to convince them to have a strong personality without too many debts with the past.

Feelings appear as a long list, as numerous are the stylistic fascinations, perfectly compacted, almost hidden but recognisable with careful listening. And it is a green light for a grey, conscious and constructive joy. It is music of multiple capacities, assorted identities absorbed in a momentum that leads to dance steps that show reality.

The voice is never emphasised, almost kept hidden, yet it is able to arouse emotion, aspects that join with the sound, a leaden but effective viaduct in keeping us company, in revealing itself as one of us, in the embrace between creator and host. Let us move on to kiss these songs, for a marriage that I wish you to celebrate within yourselves…

Song by Song 

1 - The Way You Move

We enter the room of moves, of life, of strategies, of the necessities of life, of observation, with Olli Ohlander's voice putting itself on the same level as the music: the volume, the mixing makes everything compact, for this guitar that moves with black-grey trajectories. The initial bass will be the basis of a Post-punk belonging that will find during the track the game of alternations which make it perfect to start the album.

2 - Parasite

We dance again, more and more bent into the early 80s, with guitar and synth as an ancient couple who know themselves well and produce oiled and working beams of sadness. Coldwave echoes, in the decadent direction of a sick and delicious seduction towards a musical language that defines validity and depth.

3 Sad Like You

A new One Hundred Years, but only in the very first few seconds and lightened up, immediately finds a way to move away from the uncomfortable comparison to find its own soul with amazing vocals. At the synth comes the wizard of IAMTHESHADOW to give the track an effective cloud full of crows and scratches on the skin. Poignant, remarkable, it produces pleasant pain. 

4 - Strain 

We find again the hypothesis of The Cure to caress suggestions that seem to be heading towards 1981, in southern England. But then Strain becomes a glacial, delicate and murky meteorite.

5 - Don't Fear Me

Here we are at the diamond point, at the eclipse, at a change of mode and stylistic perspective, at the point of contact with their past that nevertheless contemplates a leap forward: the band's future starts from this gem, from the darkness that is traversed with a singing-recitation of enchanting beauty. And the music is a walk through anxieties and tensions, with the melodic piano held together by a style that needs no comparison: it is to them that all the credit goes.

6 - Dreaming At Last

After the diamond, the masterpiece of this record: all the richness of a dreamlike compression finds accommodation in the interplay of dynamics that are perfect. Darkwave bites its teeth, Coldwave defends itself, resulting in the splendour of the only human victory: dreams. And no better dream than a musical one can travel between night and dawn.

7 - Sides

Sides is the song with the most melodic weight on this album: a ride through the streets of musical genres that embrace each other and then Olli's voice that is a melancholic chill that lightly burrows into the skin, but ultimately reaches the centre of our hearts. Almost on the verge of Gothic pop, the song has all the characteristics to light up dance floors.

8 - Complete Confusion

It's hard to believe that TSFP can be fierce and dramatic, but here we are in front of a mirror with multiple pieces of glass that make everything clear, in spite of the title: a song that produces addiction and clarity, because in the muffled sense of the instruments a radioactive power emerges, perfect and necessary. And the refrain is essential frenzy.

9 - Go Away

Haunting, like ravenous weeds, like a rock climbing towards the sky, Go Away is the lightning bolt that the old scribe recommends everyone to listen to: forty years of splendid attitudes summed up in 93 seconds. It is jubilation and we all walk away satisfied by these sounds and the muffled circle of light.

10 - A Searching Kiss

We come to the conclusion with a song that slows down the rhythms, but which is able to give tons of suggestions thanks to a rotating guitar and a drum machine that thickens the Coldwave soul of a fairy tale which kisses desires and shows the romantic side, although throughout the album the Swedes have not spared themselves, also showing love petals. But if the need to open our eyes to hostile reality was evident, here we kiss and dream ...

Alex Dematteis

Musicahockworld

Salford 

8th January 2023

https://thesecretfrenchpostcards.bandcamp.com/album/life-got-claws

My Review: Loom - The Dream Is Over

 My Review:

Loom - The Dream Is Over

Kalmar is an unknown place, impervious and unbearable, like everything that is distant.

Music shrinks things which seem unreachable and, bringing them to our chests, gives us an unexpected embrace.

For twenty-seven years four young men, facing their Baltic Sea, have been rummaging through feelings, tuning them to the intention of making them visible, practicable and solemn. They employ arcs of musical intelligence that makes them have no limits to cross the water composed of particles of melancholic Shoegaze, with Postpunk which supervises the whole and sprinkles of salt that contain journeys of an elegant Alternative. And finally they layer indie Rock to leave a sense of muscularity that goes with everything, like a classic suit over sneakers.

Their latest murderous charm is The Dream Is Over, which for the old scribe is absolutely the song he gave the difficult role of representing the brightest tune of the year.

Lyrics that make tears flow from our brain to the tips of our toes: a new salt lake in which we can dive, in which we can find dreams paralyzed by a reality that opposes, oppresses, kicks to reach the goal of extinguishing even the strongest faith.

In a corollary of shimmering guitars, capable of being rhythmic and dizzying, one dances curved but reassured by Evelina Nicklasson's miraculously angelic voice that rises and plummets like her words, tattooed on the rhythmic precipices of Frederick Axelsson, the guardian of every murderous impulse, because we often come to believe that feedback and his wah-wah are sharp knives aimed at defending us from senseless gestures. But one might think instead that he is the one who actually causes them: a mystery of music, to be contemplated.

Roland Klein, Henrik Viberg and Eddie Wilmin (producer and additional musician) are the masons who raise the sound system to lead it to the sky, in a chant that reaches the emotion with virulent and melancholic splashes.

And we drown in an escape that defeats all intentions, with the Baltic Sea blessing this poignant song with a telluric current that will inhabit your ecstasy colored with Nordic and perfect tears...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

30th December 2022

https://loom2.bandcamp.com/track/the-dream-is-over

https://open.spotify.com/album/1wVr4HHOIm1vJlcbKoYIOE?si=qpE7c2_FTBaQOCmHGLPeDw