The Slow Readers Club - Out Of A Dream
Hands, traces, smells, projections (some direct, others inclined to a diplomatic form of relative exhibitionism), bring the whole thing into focus like the end point of an exploding excrescence: there are facts that cannot be told, the world is not ready, and a dutiful silence kneels before a technology that has rapidly become the centre of gravity of an advancing void.
Could Mancunians The Slow Readers Club shy away from exposing the pain, the anger, the worry, from describing the world gone mad?
Certainly not, and in these ten new songs they have not neglected to employ the dripping ribaldry of blood and shavings, with a work that recaptures the band's old ardour, displacing after their album two years ago that had sown smiles, signs of peace, and exposed the Manchester band to a political stance as well.
We find ourselves with the individual at the centre, in an emotional peristalsis that does not disguise itself as a discard, keeping, unfortunately, the whole in the body of a mind without reference points. They take away space for escape and invite us to introspection, to consider optics that we thought were no longer necessary.
The music nods, borrows vessels, streams, shreds of light and sows aching petals, with a more moderate grafting of electronics and yet finding the right compromise to allow the sound streams to clarify Aaron Starkie's lyrics, here, perhaps more than ever, the album's true protagonist. It is a moderate dance, with two tracks that shake your legs, although overall you get the feeling that you are doing it with a sword of Damocles over your head, which makes it all dangerous. There is no joy in these verses, not even in the notes, bestowing a miracle of clear and pure sincerity, no falsehood, as the Manchester band has put aside what is now meaningless: no deception certainly permeates these compositions, which instead stipulate a contract with a strategic path in time.
They advance, they retreat, but never anchor the how. This makes the work a constant operation against pretence: fans will be shocked, probably not happy as it lacks those fast songs that enter the heart. Everything is slower, deeper, more mature, and it is an essential form of redemption against those who pretend compared to those who really love.
Songs like night beacons, with the waters of the ocean of living trembling, cold and disconsolate: there is a world that takes space (the technological one to be clear) that worries because it knows how to obscure relationships, values and time.
Conflict becomes a cry, marginalisation, havoc, and music the binoculars of a shaky conscience, while people all around dance without conscience.
Readers are even slower, bent, with Aaron's haggard eyes, intent on describing in depth what is prone to change a history that has decided to change forever. For the worse.
Songs witnesses.
Songs rudders of a dazed advance.
Songs like mute slaps, without bruises on the skin.
The attention to moderating the aspect of dragging the crowd into the place of sharing is evident: the notes are heaps of fog, just as the words are cobblestones that take away the security of balance, which is increasingly precarious.
An oppressive silence becomes necessary, with solitude as an inner hermitage, remaining anchored in a sociality as the bulwark of a new contradiction. Lies, broken promises, and love inclined to dissolve are the main themes of a concept album that is visual, cryptic, but so fascinating as to fully stun.
To succeed in conveying all this in notes, chords, solos, the main dynamic emphasises a shrewdness never noticed in previous works: sound planes as if planed by a mature sense of order, in a mantra less exhibited, but developed through arrangements laden with poetry and an abundant quota of a new poison, created by the band itself
The bewilderment generates fear, the fear that comes out of the tail end of this fake evolution ends up in the grooves of a vinyl that sounds like a stone in search of its proper emptiness, but the will not to bow down wins out, in the search for a dialogue without grip but preferable in any case.
Aaron's voice finds the updrafts that lead him to expose his weeping vocal chords, in an obscene path of enrichment and stun, with the falsetto taking up even more space, with words that seem to be paralysing but never the result of a flash or a mistake. Rather: he has found a way to elevate his already rich writing ability and, in doing so, here are diminished slogans and catchphrases, to instead place his visions in a sensible, fluid, amniotic, introverted circuit, but always near a lamppost with sad, worried eyes.
The climax is softened (only apparently) by a couple of ballads, which, however, eventually become a via crucis in which the thorns seem to enter perfectly into the flesh of thoughts that struggle to remain strong...
There is a form of discipline, of constructing a sense that manages to galvanise Old Scribe, and you can sense it when the band considers self-quotation in the scorching Loved You Then, which, with Dear Silence, is the only episode in which the fast rhythm carries everything away, as if the words were less blunt.
Perimeterless, introverted, caducous, almost genuflected, this manifest intention to employ the art of confrontation that does not fear confrontation becomes the only hook, the only way to bring the listeners into a necessary embrace, especially in front of the devastating Our Song Is Sung, probably the most intimate moment in the entire catalogue of the Mancunian line-up.
The voice, the arpeggio, the kneeling synth become an operative poem that shakes, tears down and shreds every possible resistance...
One becomes an orphan, a prisoner, a doll, a deactivated transistor, and thus free to think, to bring oneself back to reason: ten slaps that raise pride and scatter it in the dark zones of a struggling pain.
A record of these times, seen, described and brought to the ceiling, to illuminate the steps...
There is a thorn that must be removed and a new one inserted: probably this soundtrack will lead you to choose, to deny yourself complicity with stupidity and there will be nothing but an ocean with the intention of becoming a virgin again...
Song by Song
1 - Technofear
'You're talking too loud I can't get no sleep'
War changes faces, strategies, enters the corridors of unconsciousness and shoots, straight to the heart. The Readers find the synthesis, not only photographing but insisting, throwing words into the rhythm that confuse, thinning the truth in a song that explodes its strength in the refrain like an inevitable fragility, also thanks to the chorus that weighs it down without giving in...
The guitars bend, leave the synth phrasing, but remain sewn with their post-punk ardour to seal an absolute faith...
2 - Animals
'And so we shelter here that life outside has got so hard'
Echoes of Abba, of Blur, of OMD open the stage to host a syncopated theatre where passionate love seeks a spell. And here is the couple in the light of modernity generating fragility while, for its part, the music tries to translate it all by varying little and leaving Kurtis' guitar to remind us of The Edge in the days of Boy. Everything is fixative and the chords try to find the shortest way not to hurt themselves, and succeed in doing so...
3 - Little White Lies
'Our day is coming, our love is built to last'
Surprising, parental, bewitching, slow, far from the cliché of the four's writing, it demonstrates how to insist on a concept while minimising any suggestion that differentiating oneself is an obligatory choice. Thus we hear a poem that trembles as a loop rummages, the simple drumming lulls the steps and the bass protects, with Aaron bringing his voice a stone's throw from paradise, which awaits the couple described in the lyrics...
4 - Dear Silence
'Stepping outside the rubicon no rules apply no law this is fight you fight alone no turning back no more'
What is invoked has the awareness of a developing power: here silence advances as hypothesis, as glue, as incipit, as benefit, as a desperate place to visit. The rhythm is assertive, the rhymes dazzle, the meaning stuns and we travel into the early nineties with the sound of Kraftwerk's train. Energetic, this gem can offer miles of escapism like a slingshot that can quickly return to the sonic home of the early days of this formation. The 'old' Readers show up here and it's a joy for those who can't love their evolution...
5 - Know This I Am
'Know this I am, know this I am, I am the face in the mirror - haunted'
A guitar harps in the wind, mist descends into Aaron's sad strings, chills rush to compact and, as the singer takes up the high register, you find yourself being fragile puppies, with death knocking in the back of your mind...
Dramatic, it reveals a totally tormented caveman, becoming a murderer lulling blissfully in the restrained explosion of a guitar that sounds like a fistful of salt, while the drumming seems to be a message from Jupiter...
Love, faith, hope mutate to be bullets that can create an unexpected conflict.
Devastating...
6 - Boys So Blue
'Fake a laugh, paint a smile, boys in pain all the while, all an act, oh what can I do'
Scars: how to put them to music?
Alcohol, drugs, sex, take hold of disrespect and find themselves protagonists in this track which, like an unexpected overdose, seeks the applause of death.
The keyboard at the beginning takes us back to Cavalcade, and then the semi-acoustic guitar becomes the absolute chant that paralyses even before Aaron's actual singing. It is an urban, sullen track that tries to be kind to ugliness, winning hands down...
7 - Pirouette
'I've grown accustomed to thе life I was given, while taking hits from all sidеs'
Everest decides to take two steps, or rather, to dance, to bring a kiss to the temples of a dancer travelling in the vision of an unrealised arrival. Hope persists in the future while a gloomy cloud brings the song to a refrain that struggles to arrive, consciously, by choice, to relieve only at the right moment an evident tension.
Readers' electronics here are fully willing to take Kurtis' soaring guitar riffs and bring Everest to a happy rest...
8 - Puppets
'We could have been anything but world revolves around greed again'
Ten years after Cavalcade that brought them into the alternative circuits, the third track seems to reiterate the concept that the eighties are the years in which one can plunder, to which one can turn one's eyes. It is a very sad, intriguing moment, with a sound carpet on which to spread greed and hatred with the only real guitar solo on the whole album, in which the heart decides to go into apnoea…
9 - Loved You Then
'Loved you then but I hate you now does me good just to say it out loud'
The train arrives, guitars and synths in cahoots, sharp, piercing notes, the polar cold entering the lyrics, in a world dominated by greed the band decides to explore the recent past and change the rules of the game, even though they have the same cards.
Fast, punchy and mantric...
10 - Our Song Is Sung
'Searching my mind to find something to say get out of here'
And that's the end. Which remains, relentless, in pastel-tinged verses and notes, to generate tears and mudslides, with death opening its arms, smiling, while the singing sweeps away the dreams, in a synth that surrounds the pain with feathery nights, and the guitar plumbs its claws gently, in a poignant and paralysing hiatus. The Readers' saddest song ever closes this album, and one struggles to imagine a track that condenses the truth with greater skill than this one. And the falsetto, shuddering snare that sweeps away the light makes this close a blessing.
And we go back to listening to the first one to fool ourselves, while the truth the four of them have etched it forever...
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
6-3-2025
